TV overkill: A serial murderer in prime time

WASHINGTON -- Just when you think you've seen the worst the great wasteland of television can produce, the people who have given new meaning to the word "trash" over the last 60 years have outdone themselves. They have made a hero out of a sadistic serial killer and given him prime-time position.This isn't a review and I am not a TV critic, and certainly not one who condemns everything intruding on our lives that allows us to see extended versions of our favorite poisons. But of all those mindless, inane shows that dominate the 8-11 p.m. time slot, the hourlong opus about a medical examiner by day who dispatches people right and left by night, often torturing and cutting them up while he savors every moment, is a nauseatingly new low. They're even planning a video game of these atrocities.Anyone who could stomach watching this gruesome nightmare that originated on pay-cable TV probably would have liked to have seen a live broadcast of Vlad the Impaler on one of his better days had there been cameras around then. The lame attempt to justify the carnage by showing that the victims of "Dexter" have escaped earlier punishment makes the whole thing even more obnoxious and insulting to those who shoulder the burden of protecting us and are often held up to ridicule by Hollywood.And before you begin citing all those horror flicks and slasher films, some of them disgustingly brutal and bloody, just remember that at least they aren't being carried out by the local medical examiner and sanctioned by network television at a time when even children have access. Also, don't bother pointing out in defense that the great musical "Sweeney Todd" isn't exactly taken from "A Child's Garden of Verse." After all, one has to pay to see the mad barber -- on the stage or in the movie -- send his victims down a chute to be ground up and served as meat pies. He also isn't giving men too-close shaves in prime time.This rant is really about a lack of responsibility that seems to leave us exposed to, actually bombarded with, the worst of human nature in this new age of electronic wonderment, where young people participate in games of computer violence, winning points for slaying whatever gets in their path. Is it any wonder there is an atrocity somewhere around a school or mall nearly every other day, many of them appearing to be patterned off the latest technological tour de force by strange people who fantasize in one color -- red?The show "Dexter" was bad enough when it was on cable, but at least then it was offered to an audience limited to those who subscribed, and by the late hour of its airing. But now it creeps into the living room, den or bedroom early enough for all the family to enjoy. The motivation, as usual, is money. Broadcasters are desperately seeking ways to boost non-election-year revenues in the age when cable premium channels like HBO and Showtime are winning critical acclaim and reaping large profits from "The Sopranos," "Deadwood," "Weed" and "Californication" -- all glorifying those things we are trying to teach our children to avoid.Censorship is not what is being advocated here -- just the realization that no amount of money is justification for promoting official mayhem when serial killers seem to be lurking in every neighborhood. Self-policing in television is utterly quixotic, appearing and disappearing in a nanosecond. A common expletive is bleeped out one moment while blood spurts unrestrained from the victim of an ax murderer the next. There can be utter outrage and threats of reprisal when Janet Jackson's breast is exposed during the halftime show of a Super Bowl broadcast, but nothing done to soften a rape scene or the murder of an innocent. While "Dexter" is to be toned down graphically, the premise of the show is still there and as crazy as he is.Unfortunately, all this fascination with carnage and moral depravity that indulges every twisted whim only enhances the cause of those who would enforce the strictest censorship, putting our constitutional rights in harm's way. While the First Amendment might fend off the book-burners now, who knows what some future Supreme Court might rule in the absence of self-restraint by those producing entertainment for the masses?Obviously, the best way to kill off "Dexter" is not to watch him. But he never should have darkened our TV screens in the first place. Now consider a video game of this horror. Unbelievable.(Dan K. Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.)