A consistent theme of “Dexter,” the grisly Showtime drama about a sympathetic serial killer played by Michael C. Hall, has always been the anti-hero’s inability to connect to human emotions. The series, based on Jeff Lindsay’s novels, succeeds at making the audience relate to a character who commits loathsome acts (to avenge other loathsome acts), while remaining oddly alienated from his own feelings.
It’s a complicated role for an actor, one that Hall has perfected over four seasons.
Season 5 begins Sunday at 7 p.m. with a new challenge.
Dexter now turns from happily married husband to guilt- ridden single dad. With the death of his wife, Rita, at the end of last season, the stakes are changed. How unfeeling is he, how far removed from grief?
The season opens where the story left off: Rita’s lifeless body in the blood-filled bathtub. The rest of the hour is devoted to cleanup, physical and narrative.
The producers have stated the theme this year is “Dexter’s atonement,” with a number of guest actors lined up to help him along, including Jonny Lee Miller, Peter Weller and Julia Stiles.
“He’s not a character who experiences guilt or grief like any of us would,” executive producer Chip Johannessen told critics. “So it’s not his intention starting out, but the season kind of becomes about (atonement) as he slides into it. He trips into it, this kind of oddly human experience, at a time where he just feels that everything that he has done that had to do with connecting with humanity has melted down in this horrible, horrible way.”
The structure will be different, that is, Dexter won’t have a single outside evil force to battle throughout this season. Instead, he’ll be battling within himself.
Cops, cops and more cops.
Generations of cops. They almost can’t help themselves, it’s in their (blue) blood.
“Blue Bloods,” premiering tonight at 9 on KCNC-Channel 4, marks Tom Selleck’s return to series TV. Donnie Wahlberg is there, too, as the hothead for viewers younger than “Magnum” vintage. Will Estes is the youngest son, fresh out of Harvard Law School and golden boy of the family. But, wouldn’t you know it, he, too, wants to be a cop. There’s even a senior senior cop, played by Len Cariou. Bridget Moynahan, the only female in the family, is the assistant district attorney and “legal compass” for her family.
Three generations of New York City police share family dinners as well as their devotion to keeping the city safe. So far, that makes “Blue Bloods” a standard procedural hybridized with a family drama. But there’s a potentially interesting undercurrent of scandalous doings inside the force — an ancient order of a super-secret society of cops? — that even the chief (Selleck) doesn’t know about. The tale is further complicated by an overhanging mystery regarding the death of the chief’s son years earlier.
The series, from Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess (both of “The Sopranos”), begins adequately if unexcitingly. The producers will have to decide how far to go in playing up family ties as opposed to crime and crime-solving.
Changes behind the scenes, in cast and crew, don’t bode well. Given the Friday-night death slot, the network doesn’t expect much.
Pilot reruns.
The networks are giving you every chance to latch onto the new season.
In case you missed the start of the heavily promoted “The Event,” NBC reruns the opener Saturday, at 7 p.m. locally on Channel 9. (Not so much a spoiler as fair warning: I’ve seen two subsequent episodes and the story is veering into extraterrestrial territory. They’re hiding in plain sight!)
NBC reruns the pilot of “The Chase,” starring Kelli Giddish as a tough-on-crime U.S. marshal in Texas, at 8 p.m. Saturday on Channel 9.
And CBS replays the “Hawaii Five-O” opener at 7 p.m. Saturday on Channel 4.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
