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The greatest TV show I have seen in a very long time is Dexter.

Channel 10 here in Australia decided to show the first season earlier this year, after Rove, but after watching it, and seeing that they don’t seem to be planning to “Fasttrack” it like some other, less worthy programs, I downloaded Season 2.

We finished watching the last episode last night.

There are so many reasons that this is a great show. I’ll try to be general enough not to create spoilers from season 2, but I can’t promise anything.

Firstly, Dexter breaks lots of rules. We are forced to identify with (and like) a person who is truly evil. Lets face it - Dexter kills people. I can’t even bring myself to accept killing people who have been legitimately convicted of murder, or even the Bali bombers. I’m not saying I support them in any way: I do not, but I also do not believe that any person or government has the right to take the lives of any other person. Under any circumstances. Even if they take more than 12 items through the 12 item or less isle at the supermarket. Yet, even after a couple of episodes, the likeableness of the monster that is Dexter grows on us. It’s not really his fault he is a monster - he just deals with it the only way he knows.

Secondly, the plot is well written, and the writers still manage to throw in heaps of surprises. When we first discover that Rudy is Dexter’s brother, Jaq and I both looked at one another, and it was a bit like the time you first saw “The Sixth Sense,” and played back all of the scenes with Bruce Willis and his wife, thinking about how well it was all done. Far too often the suspense is not hidden from the viewers, and it is based simply on the lack of knowledge of one or more characters. Indeed, this is the case with how Dexter is living amongst the police he works with, and we all know something about him, yet everyone else doesn’t.

Many of the characters in Dexter annoy me, or at least did to begin with. Debra is kind of funny looking, and a bit dopey at times. Doakes appears to be simplistic, and the only member of a whole department of police who even have any inkling that Dexter is strange. LaGuerta and most of the rest of the cops are single-dimensional, and it’s really only Angel and Misuka who have much of a character development arc. However, Paul, Rita and her family are all very “real,” and we can’t help but feel bad for them when things go against them. Even Paul. Having said that, I really like Doakes and Angel, and when the lives of these two men are put in danger, one can’t help be worried about their fate. There is another character in Season 2 who I really felt no connection with - but I won’t give away too much by saying their name. (wink).

The other thing I really respect about Dexter, over something like Heroes or Lost is the realisation that not every episode needs to end with a cliffhanger. Sometimes it does, which keeps you watching, but the reliance on “I have to know what comes next” wears thin. This was what turned me off Lost, since the cliffhanger what not really resolved. With Heroes, too, I stopped watching, because the complexity meant the only way to watch it was to watch it all in one go. Which I did for Season 1, and most of Season 2, but one does not always have time to watch 22 hours of television in one sitting. Dexter, on the other hand, was happy to resolve “everything” at the end of each season, and often have resolution at the end of episodes. This makes for a healthier viewing schedule, and less annoyance!

Without giving too much more away, the first season is about Dexter learning about his past, and how he deals with the Ice Truck killer. The implications of the story are that he has been killing for years, but the interesting times come when he is put under the pressure of someone else knowing about “his work”, and how he struggles to deal with this. The second season starts with his “corpus of work” being found, and how he deals with the fact the FBI are tracking him down. Both of these are real times in his life of upheaval, and the underlying increasing memory of his early childhood complicates how he deals with these. But what does that leave us to learn from Season 3? How can things possibly continue to ramp up?

I have faith they will manage to make Dexter Season 3 interesting…