Murder's never looked so good with 'Dexter'

It's difficult to explain to someone who has never seen "Dexter" why it is currently the most riveting and addictive show. "It's about this guy named Dexter who works as a blood splatter analyst for the Miami Police Department but is also secretly a serial killer," you say, adding quickly, "except he only kills bad people, the kind the law can't touch. He has this code of honor and he's played by Michael C. Hall, who is just amazing because he makes Dexter kind of lovable and, well, you just have to watch it."

Fortunately, as "Dexter" wades deeper into its fourth season (9 p.m. Sundays, Showtime), there aren't too many people who haven't seen it, or at least heard of it. Hall's recent marriage to Jennifer Carpenter, who plays Dexter's foulmouthed, unlucky-in-love detective sister Debra, prompted a few headlines, and then Hall was nominated for another Emmy.

Now the show has the added mainstream credibility of John Lithgow, beloved star of stage, screen and the children's book/CD circuit. Lithgow plays the Trinity Killer, a serial murderer as methodical and duplicitous as our man Dexter. The season opened, in fact, with a woman coming home to find Lithgow, stark naked, heaven help us, in her bathroom. He later cradled her terror-shaken body in the water and cut her throat, holding up a hand mirror so she could watch herself die.

Chilling and yet perversely beautiful, it promised a most electric season, which as we head into the sixth episode, the show has more than delivered; with some 2 million viewers, Sunday's episode was the most watched in the series' history.

The viewership jump may be the result of a recent cliffhanger in which Debra and her off-again/on-again lover Frank Lundy (Keith Carradine) wound up shot in a parking lot, or perhaps it was just the chance to see Lithgow channeling creepy duplicity. But more probably it's the natural order of things - inevitably, you surrender to "Dexter" because it keeps doing things you don't think you could ever watch in such a way that you simply must.

Darkly hilarious, "Dexter" is essentially the story of the ultimate misfit. Dexter simply does not understand the language of emotion or the social cues.

Guided by his adoptive father, Harry (James Remar), he relies instead on a code of survival, a code that has been tested over the last three seasons by various events, the most important of which being his growing love for Rita (Julie Benz) and her two children. After Rita discovered she was pregnant, last season ended with the two getting married.

Many of us spent much of the summer wondering how in the world the writers were going to navigate the murky waters of Serial Killer Dad.

In this season's early episodes, as the Trinity Killer went about his deadly business, poor old sleep-deprived Dexter was learning to multitask. Forget "must watch" - this season's "Dexter" is "can't wait" television.

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