Dexter, one out of the box
ByEmpty of soul, or half full? A producer tells Joanna Weiss about the character of a serial killer.
CLYDE Phillips has worked in television for decades, creating such shows as Suddenly Susan and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose. Now he’s moved from breezy sitcoms and high-school dramedies to behind the scenes at Dexter, the series about a serial killer who’s surprisingly easy to love. He talks about blood, moral ambiguity and the pleasures of working on the US cable channel Showtime.
How did you come to Dexter?The pilot was made by my partners, John Goldwyn and Sara Colleton. They had found the book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay. Showtime agreed to pick up the series, and then it was looking for what’s called a show runner (series producer). That’s what I do. They sent me the pilot and I said, “Boy, do I really want to go there every week?” Not go to Los Angeles, but go to that place in my head and my heart and my soul. I looked at the pilot and said, like Dexter, “I do”.
Could this show appear on American network TV?Not and maintain its integrity.
What do you think would be changed?The moral ambiguity that we are allowed to constantly pursue without having to answer it. We’re talking about network TV as opposed to cable. I don’t see The Shield on network TV; I think it would lose a lot of its testosterone. I think we would lose a lot of our edge. I think we would lose the ability to live in the shadows we do.
Some people probably shy away from the show because they think it will be too bloody.We don’t show it. We talk about it. We see the preamble of it, we see the aftermath of it. If you add it all up, the 12 episodes, it’s probably 100 seconds of gore. Less than 10 seconds an episode. It’s nothing. Whereas, on CSI, you’ve got body parts, you’re going inside bodies, you’re seeing some gruesome corpses and things. We don’t really need that, I think, because we really pursue the emotional.
Does the show have internal rules?We try to tell the stories though Dexter’s point of view. We only use slow motion if we’re either in Dexter’s head or looking at him. The flashbacks always have to be emotionally motivated. Almost all of the flashbacks are back to Harry, his father. They need to be emotionally driven, rather than plot driven. I think all of that contributes to the success of the show. It’s emotion, character, and plot, in that order. And I think that’s why people embrace the show.
Some viewers think Michael C. Hall was robbed of an Emmy nomination.Everybody puts on their straight face about this, but to take off my mask for a minute, we were stunned that Michael didn’t get nominated, as were the critics. I’ve got to say that I was a little mopey that day.
Last season, Dexter talked a lot about how disconnected he was. But he always seemed more emotionally involved than he let himself believe.Early on in the pilot, he looked at the doughnut box and said, “Empty, just like me.” I personally, honestly, didn’t think that was true. I think his emotional capacity is like that French coffee press that you push down. And the little bubbles that come up? I think those little bubbles are bubbles of emotion coming up out of him. Emotions that he doesn’t fully have a handle on, but emotions that scratch at him a little.
What’s in store for season two?The challenge was, we held nothing back in the first year. So we sort of set the high-jump bar and now we had to do the pole-vault. If the first year was the origin story, which is a showbiz phrase, then this year is the sort of deconstructing and putting him back together. I guess the theme of the second year is, “Am I good or am I evil?”
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