May 3, 2007
Sympathy for the Devil
A thought provoking article from Newsweek dating back to last October - on the success of two of the latest Television series ("Dexter" and "Weeds") by Showtime, "who's main characters are morally ambiguous, adding on to an ever-growing list of television shows whose central characters traverse moral boundaries that most viewers would never cross.
[ This article, followed up by my watching both "Weeds" and "Dexter" has changed my perception of TV shows forever and leads me to wonder if these shows that we find wonderful (I did), are windows not only to our souls but to our Occidental society as a whole, and I wonder, with satellite dishes now popping up in Afghanistan, Irak and Iran and other parts of the world, will such shows not fuel hatred for our culture in the muslim world.
It's something I mean to research for this blog, the perception of our culture and America through television shows.
I will also follow the rising popularity of user generated video sites, publishing the latest episode of the last series of popular TV shows broadcasted in the US, a huge treat for Europeans, who usually get the shows on their TV channels 6 months to a year after America. I'll follow Big Media's efforts to fight back as they experience similar copyright infringement issues as the Music industry. ]
Dexter: The titular character, a police forensics expert in Miami, in his spare time, stalks and kills murderers who have somehow escaped justice. If it sounds dark, that’s because it is. It’s also, surprisingly enough, funny, sweet and intriguing.
Weeds: is about a suburban mother of two who sells marijuana to maintain her family’s lifestyle—it’s because heroes show us how we’d like to be, while antiheroes show us how we actually are.
The exploration of the redeemable villain is hardly new, but the new crop of antiheroes are being explored with more gusto than ever before, and “Dexter” walks the cutting edge. “We’ve seen this for years but [‘Dexter’] just trumps it,” says Dr. Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Television and Popular Culture.
Because pay-cable channels such as Showtime are beholden to subscribers, not advertisers, they have the latitude to focus on darker characters like emotionally troubled mobster Tony Soprano of HBO’s hit “The Sopranos.”
... Morally questionable antiheroes are all over the screen, from a curmudgeonly surgeon with a decimating wit (“House”) and loose convicts (“Prison Break”) on Fox, to a ruthless cop (“The Shield”) and narcissistic plastic surgeon (“Nip/Tuck”) on FX."
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