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Darkness in the Sunshine State

In the new Showtime series 'Dexter,' Michael C. Hall plays a Miami police specialist and all-around sweet guy - when he's not busy as a serial killer

BY DIANE WERTS | Newsday Staff Writer

October 1, 2006

Michael C Hall as Dexter in Showtime's new series. (Showtime Photo)

The broiling weather sets the scene to perfection. Must be more than 100 degrees outside - even hotter on the concrete parking lot where Miami Metro police cars sit gleaming in the noontime sunshine. It's so steamy, streaks of light glint off the Florida city's seafront like plastic confetti streaming off the water.

Oh, wait. That's precisely what it is. We've stepped inside Stage 16 at Hollywood's Sunset Gower studios. Twirls of clear plastic dangle from the "ocean" half of a skyline photo cyclorama, which is then lit to serve as a "sunny" Miami backdrop to soundstage sets representing that semi-tropical locale. The heat wave outside is real - Los Angeles had a brutal summer - but that's about it.

The rest is deceptive veneer. An artificial facade. Just like the man whose tale it serves to tell.

"Dexter" delivers an unlikely hero, if you can call the title character that.

"He's a serial killer," star Michael C. Hall says matter-of-factly. With his sizzling new Showtime vehicle (premiering Sunday night at 10), Hall has stayed on the same fatal playing field he occupied with the HBO hit that made his name. On "Six Feet Under," the lauded New York stage actor drew TV raves as an uptight mortuary manager wrestling with his once-closeted gay identity. This time, he gets to be the most relaxed guy in the world, by all indications - an easygoing Miami police blood-spatter specialist who's got waterfront digs, an adoring girlfriend, a devoted cop sister and a reputation as an all-around nice guy. It's just that in his spare time Dexter Morgan hunts and dismembers heinous killers who've evaded the yoke of justice.

Hall is tying his shoes as he prepares to shoot some office scenes with cop colleagues. That means he's tying Dexter's shoes. Very neatly.

"He is meticulous," Hall says slowly, deliberately. "It's all very considered."

"Sensual fascination"

That makes Dexter great at deducing how killings occurred, from just the patterns of blood left behind. And great at planning murders, too. "There is a sublimated sensual fascination with blood," Hall says, "that he works out day and night. His day job. And his night ..." He searches for the word. "Job," he sheepishly concludes.

There's a smile, almost, but not quite, resonating as a creepy insinuation that he knows more than you do, but just isn't quite ready to share it. Not yet. That almost-real expression is a very Dexter accomplishment. It's also his agony. He's got everybody fooled into thinking he's a regular person, with genuine feelings.

But "I don't have feelings about anything at all," Dexter tells the audience when he narrates his show's premiere, letting us in on his very adult game of pretend. "I'm floating on the surface of my own life," he says in voice-over next week, after we've seen him very cleanly take apart a perp, as he starts tracking the next one.

"You know, as an actor," Hall says, "it's interesting to play a role where you don't really have to preoccupy yourself with any need to convince yourself that you're not acting."

Dexter is "not empty inside," assures writer/show runner Clyde Phillips, chatting on set in the lieutenant's office as his actors run scenes across the stage. That's despite a line of narration in the pilot where Dexter describes himself that way.

"Instead, his emotions - through stuff that's happened in the past, which you'll see later this season - have been pressed down, like a French coffee press," Phillips explains. "And what happens is, anytime something stimulates it, something will bubble up. 'What was that I just felt? Was that jealousy? Was that fear? Was that compassion?'"

Dexter has clamped down on feelings for a reason. Taken in at the age of 4 by a good-cop foster father, he'd been through something horrific, it's hinted both here and in "Darkly Dreaming Dexter," Jeff Lindsay's mystery novel that inspired the series. Dexter's father, Harry, played in telling flashbacks by James Remar, recognizes his young boy's bloodthirsty "urges" and raises him to "channel it, use it for good" in dealing with "terrible people."

In some weird way, bolstered by his well-honed sense of ironic humor, Dexter could just possibly be seen as a well-adjusted guy. "I mean, he's saddled with quite a burden," Hall says, "this compulsion that, at least as it's presented to him by his foster father, is an inevitability. He's really taken unique responsibility for it."

Faithful to the novels

Like Lindsay's two novels ("Dearly Devoted Dexter" just came out in paperback), Showtime's series puts the viewer inside those decisions, through first-person narration in which Dexter bares his soul. Such as it is. "The audience is sort of brought in - implicated, in a way - being in on the secret that no one else is," Hall says.

The show's visual style also lends a subjective perspective, creating a moody Miami with the crisp neon sheen and almost dreamlike underbelly that Dexter sees. "We do a film noir kind of style - a film noir, graphic novel, Scorsese and Cronenberg kind of thing," says director of photography Romeo Tirone, decamped to Hollywood for seven months from his Dix Hills home to shoot "Dexter's" first season of 12 episodes.

"We're shooting HD , but then we also use a film camera to do various speeds, like the high-speed stuff, from his point of view," Tirone says on set, busily "creating Dexter's world."

Finding a morbid joy

That stylized look, with its creepy low angles and peeping fish-eye lenses, matches the emotional tonality chosen by pilot writer James Manos Jr. (who cut his teeth on "The Sopranos") and director Michael Cuesta (who comes off "Six Feet Under" and the indie feature "L.I.E."). Their episodes revel in Cuban music, constant eating and mordant humor, as when Dexter assures the audience that though his foster parents are dead, "I didn't kill them. Honest." The show exudes what one of Dexter's colleagues says he displays: "a morbid sense of fun."

This first season takes many of its cues from "Darkly Dreaming Dexter," bringing to life (and death) the book's victims and locales, including the memorable spectacle of severed body parts neatly stacked in goal at a hockey arena. There are continuing themes - heat vs. cold, bloody messes vs. pristinely drained flesh, fitting in vs. feeling isolated. Dexter's impulses are piqued when he discovers he has what you might call a mortal rival. Or maybe a killer playmate. Someone who's definitely "raising the bar" on bloodless butchery.

"We have them doing a danse macabre through the whole year, and then it all blows open," Phillips promises. "This season is building to a huge, mysterious, operatic finale."

TV doesn't get much hotter.

Or colder.