I came to appreciate Kevin Smith for his film Chasing Amy. Like all of his early movies, Chasing Amy works because it’s well cast and well written, but not necessarily because it’s well directed. It’s not, but Kevin Smith will be the first to admit that he’s not really a directer. He’s a writer. However, once I saw Red State, I have to disagree with him. Smith has said over and over that after Red State he’s “got one more movie in him” — his hockey epic, Hit Somebody. This is an utter tragedy because after watching Red State, I’m of the opinion that Kevin Smith has finally learned to make movies as well as he writes them.

Enough preamble though, here’s why Red State is worth your dollars to own, and your time to watch.

A unique, relevant and compelling story
What’s important to understand from the outset is that Red State is a religio-political horror movie. It’s not a comedy, though it is funny. It’s not a thriller, although it is thrilling. Kevin Smith’s synopsis on his podcasts has been “Three boys go into the woods to find sex. Instead, they find God.” The story centers around the Five Points Church, an extreme right wing religious group based in part on Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church group (the “God hates fags” people who love to protest military funerals and anything else they can show up to) and one part on the Branch Davidians (the group involved in the ATF’s infamous Waco, TX incident). Although they are also protesting funerals with an anti-LGBT message, Red State‘s Five Points Church is not intended to be a stand-in for either group. In fact, Fred Phelps is mentioned by name in the film as someone other than Five Points’ Abin Cooper, played by Michael Parks.

The story starts in typical Kevin Smith style, with plenty of raunchy talk and snappy dialogue. The plot gets rolling when the three boys we meet in the beginning of the movie make their way up to the town of Cooper’s Dell for an internet sex hookup. We quickly learn that aside from their funeral protests, the Five Points Church is (SPOILER ALERT) trapping people with sex, then executing them inside their church compound because it’s “what the book says.” That book is, of course, the Bible. The first person we see Abin Cooper and his “family” execute is a homosexual teenager. This, as the three boys we met in the beginning of the film look on in horror, knowing that they’re probably next. The sequence is riveting and you realize that the horror in this horror movie is not in the violence, but the religious extremism of the Five Points Church congregation. Act one ends with the boys getting loose, and through a series of mishaps, the true nature of Five Points Church’s activities comes to the attention of the authorities — mostly through gunfire.

Act two introduces us to ATF agent Joseph Keenan, played by John Goodman. Keenan is awoken by a phone call from his superiors and inevitably has to go deal with the Five Points Church situation. Once there, he’s joined by the ever wise-cracking Kevin Pollak, who is simultaneously hilarious and credible as a jaded ATF agent. I won’t spoil the climax or the denouement, but I will say that how Goodman and Park’s characters finally meet face to face is one of the most brilliant bits of plot writing in recent memory. It’s surprising, mysterious and had me sold hook, line and sinker. It was especially satisfying given my own religious upbringing, as I instantly knew which part of the Christian doomsday mythos Smith was referencing.

The third act of Red State is almost entirely Kevin Smith doing what Kevin Smith does best: telling a story in dialogue. John Goodman is giving a debriefing deposition to two gentlemen from the Department of Homeland Security regarding the incident at Cooper’s Dell. Pay special attention to Agent Hammond, played by Mad Men alum Patrick Fischler. He delivers the essential morale of the story, which I won’t spoil for you here. I will say that it’s a bit of preaching that the movie earns. In a single sentence, Hammond delivers a poignant commentary on religious extremism that lands like an anvil from a cliff top.

Immaculate casting, cinematography and dare I say it, directing
Red State is as well cast as it is well written. It’s a very “tight” little movie and the cast of actors bring it to life could not be better matched to their task. Michael Parks is downright haunting as Abin Cooper. Melissa Leo as the manic Five Points matriarch, Sara Cooper, is as frightening as any knife-weilding slasher I’ve ever seen in her desperate, frantic fanaticism. John Goodman’s performance as the tired, conflicted Agent Joseph Keenan commands the screen whenever he’s on camera. I was charmed to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum Marc Blucas in a smallish role as an ATF sniper. Stephen Root is brilliant as the closeted local Sheriff. And of course, Kevin Pollak is delightfully himself as Goodman’s ATF partner. The whole ensemble cast simply works.

Watching Red State, I also couldn’t help but notice how good looking it was. The Kevin Smith movies I know and love were schlocky-looking at best, but it didn’t matter because we weren’t there for the visual arts. Red State is gorgeous. It’s so well shot and I couldn’t help but lovingly think “he finally learned how to make a movie. Good for him!” Knowing that Kevin Smith also edited the film himself, he really does deserve full credit for how well made this movie is. I didn’t think he had it in him. I knew the guy could write, but knowing that Red State is his penultimate film, I’m actually kinda bummed that he’s getting out of directing. It’s that little bit of outrage. “This!? This is what you were capable of all along? And now you’re quitting?”

Will you enjoy this movie?
Tastes vary widely, obviously, but let me take a stab. The obligatory preamble about language and adult situations applies. This is an R rated movie, after all. However, you don’t need to be a fan of the horror genre to enjoy this movie. I’m not. You don’t need to be a die-hard Jay & Bob fan. There are no “snoochy booches” inside jokes. You don’t need to be a hard core liberal or an anti-religion subscriber to Richard Dawkins and the like. The message of Red State is relevant to us all, regardless of our faith or our political leanings. However, I think that if you are a fan of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, you owe it to yourself to see Red State. If you appreciate writing over star power, explosions and tits, then you’ll likely appreciate what Kevin Smith has done here. Most of all though, Red State is a movie that needs to be seen. It was a movie made almost entirely outside “the system” of corporate Hollywood. It’s the kind of movie that gets made when a talented artist has something worth saying — has an actual point of view worth sharing.

So stream it. Buy it. Do whatever you have to do, but watch Red State if you can. It will never be more relevant than it is right now, both to our culture and to the industry of movie making. It’s the halo work of art — the siren song to independent storytellers everywhere that, as Kevin Smith himself puts it, “If this monkey can make a movie this good, you can too!”

Your suspension of disbelief is rewarded straight away, as the action picks up and the character of these kids comes into sharper focus. They don’t realize they have powers for a little while and meanwhile “The Storm”, as it is referred to throughout the series, hasn’t just effected them, but others as well. I won’t spoil the principle event that drives the plot of the first season forward, but it’s a real-world problem they must now use their otherworldly abilities to try to solve. These social outcasts literally have no one to turn to, and must band together because of their shared proximity to what’s happened.

Misfits excels because of fantastic writing, stellar filmmaking and great casting. The Mrs and I watched all six episodes of the first season in nearly one sitting. It’s a truly remarkable, captivating series. The characters are well drawn, immaculately cast, but most importantly they’re believable. They react not necessarily in the way you might expect them to, but in ways that are informed by who their character is, what they want and most importantly, in the insane context of their situation. The unexpected is simply surprising, rather than a random, unmotivated non-sequitor. The writers avoid a couple of cardinal sins of sci-fi writing. Firstly, the audience doesn’t get ahead of the characters. We’re not sitting around waiting for them to discover some key piece of information or witness some key piece of plot that we saw 20 minutes ago. Many episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation are guilty of this — something I hadn’t been aware of before listening to Wil Wheaton’s fabulous podcast for his book, Memories of the Future. That Columbo-style story structure just doesn’t work anymore, and especially in science fiction where you find an audience hungry for both detail and plot velocity.

The second sin masterfully avoided by the writers of Misfits is the sin of context amnesia. Whenever the kids encounter something out of the ordinary, their first assumption is that it’s related to The Storm. Of course it is. That’s the premise of the show, but it’s also what any rational human being would assume if they’d been given super powers by some singular, shared event. If something weird is going on, it’s probably related to that really big, really weird thing that we all experienced earlier. Duh. It’s so basic, but many shows miss this entirely. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve yelled at my TV during an episode of Eureka when Sheriff Carter will witness something extremely out of the ordinary, recount it to the people at Global Dynamics, only to have them never believe him!. The Eureka creators put us in this town where something unexpected, whimsical and usually dangerous happens basically every day. Yet, the people who live and work there are completely incredulous and dismissive of anyone (especially Sheriff Carter) who reports something out of the ordinary. It’s as though they wake up every morning and forget that they live in Eureka, the weirdest town on earth. This drives me crazy! Thankfully, Misfits doesn’t try to hide what you already know, and its characters actually have memory of what they’ve previously experienced. They know that The Storm almost always explains some part of what’s going on. By simply embracing that, it frees the writers to better explore how and even why the storm is influencing them, the people around them, or the situations at large.

With great writing building the foundation, Misfits also has a fantastic look and production value to it. I’ve been watching it in HD on Hulu Plus through my Xbox 360 and it just looks so good. Not in the vibrant, colorful way that Heroes often looked, but in a more grounded, gritty aesthetic that makes everything look like it’s been shot with only ambient light. From the lighting, to how the shots are framed, to the creative cinematic vignettes between scenes, I just couldn’t take my eyes off off it. It demands to be watched, but without any distracting, gimmicky, 300-esque, gratuitous camera work that takes you out of the moment. The DP’s, Christopher Ross and David Raedeker, are masters of their craft.

Great camera work is pointless without stellar performances though, which the cast of Misfits deliver every single episode. The show is arresting enough just in its cinematography and storyline, but the way the actors inhabit these roles really sets a new bar for television performances. There are little touches of improvisation and personality that the actors bring to their characters, especially Robert Sheehan, who plays the lead role of Nathan Young. You’ll not find a more lovable, smart-ass delinquent in all of cinema and television. The whole cast is so natural, so inhabitive of their roles that even now I have difficulty thinking about these people having regular lives that don’t involve them reading minds, rewinding time or turning invisible. They help create this incredibly immersive world full of mystery, possibility, pain and triumph. No wonder the show is already winning awards.

So if you haven’t yet seen Misfits, I highly recommend giving it a go. It’s available on Hulu and other web sources, and the second season just kicked off with new episodes each Thursday. I guarantee, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.

^{*not to be confused with the MTV version of Skins}

The book explores our cultural discomfort with risk and danger and challenges the assumption that minimizing risk is always the correct path. As compelling as his case for “edge work” is, I have to give further credit to Gurstelle for admitting that not all of us are comfortable with even his very sensible embracing of danger. As such, it’s not a book that’s going to resonate with absolutely everyone. Instead, this book is written for who he identifies as “the Golden Third” — the 34% of the general population who have a higher comfort with risk, yet aren’t off the deep end taking risks far beyond reason and responsible citizenship. Gurstelle propositions, I think accurately, that this group (of which I am an enthusiastic member) often lacks constructive outlets for a sensible embrace of danger that really satisfies their yearning for exhilaration. Between our very litigious culture and the post 9/11 climate, Gurstelle’s assertion that the adventurous among us should embrace their inner MacGyver is both brave and refreshing.

But what purpose does it really serve? To what practical end does “edge work” make our lives better aside from some vague, self-indulgent satisfaction in risk taking? In his chapter entitled “Why Live Dangerously”, Gurstelle states the following:

First, artful yet dangerous living builds your repertoire of life experiences and your store of practical knowledge. Almost every new, varied, and unusual experience you have makes you more valuable on some level because it builds within you something called “deep smarts.”

What are deep smarts? Dorothy Leonard, professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School, and Walter Swap, professor of psychology emeritus at Tufts University, coined the phrase in their well-regarded book by the same name. They define deep smarts as the accumulated know-how and intuition gained through extensive and varied experience. It’s expertise in the form of practical wisdom. Leonard and Swap tell us that it’s just such deep smarts that provide the foundation for an individual’s overall success.

It appears from their research that nurturing your risk-taking skills should result in personal experiences stored deep in our intellect, which have potential for personal value greater than any book learning. According to Dr. Swap, “Someone who may have a lot of book learning but not a lot of real life experience won’t be able to look at a new situation and say, ‘Aha, that reminds me of a time when I did X.’ and that memory suggests a way to act. A person with deep smarts may not actually be able to recognize or to put into so many words where that knowledge came from—but is nonetheless able to react quickly and wisely.”

This “deep smarts” concept dovetails very nicely into what Matthew Crawford talks about in Shop Class as Soulcraft regarding the hands-on nature of real expertise. As valuable as education is, no book can ever teach you better than your own two hands. This applies to specific skills, such as Crawford’s work as a motorcycle mechanic, but also in building our own MacGyver-esque understanding of the world around us. Gurstelle isn’t done there, however. Artfully dangerous living has another benefit to impart.

Taking risks proves your mettle, it displays your inner bravery. And successful outcomes in risky propositions lead to a well-deserved sense of accomplishment. These aren’t just my opinions. There is a considerable body of scientific evidence backing up this assertion. At least two rigorously conducted scientific studies statistically show that, in the long run, people who take reasonable risks are happier and more successful.

He goes on to reference those studies in more depth. The bottom line is that your attitude toward risk has a direct effect on both your satisfaction in living, and your more tangible personal success in your career and other endeavors. “Playing it safe” rarely leads us to the success we really want. Never extending ourselves beyond the “safe” and the known robs us of both the satisfaction of success and the lessons of failure.

I won’t summarize Gurstelle’s entire philosophy, but I do wholeheartedly endorse it. The book is such a quick read that even if you weren’t inclined to purchase it, nearly anyone could get through it in a single sitting at their favorite book shop in probably no more than 3 cups of coffee. So as such, I recommend it to anyone looking for a little extra adventure in their life. His philosophy alone is worth the read, but I also really appreciated his project suggestions, which include:

• Making gun powder, solid rocket motors, slow/quick match (fuses), and smoke bombs
• Throwing knives, cracking whips, and the mysterious martial art of Baritsu (umbrella jujitsu)
• Smoking the occasional cigarette and learning basic zippo lighter tricks
• Drinking the occasional shot of Absinthe
• Driving fast — how to do it safely and legally
• Persiflage and practical joking — or put another way, being a big, fat hairy liar for fun
• Exotic eating (including legitimately dangerous food like Japanese tiger pufferfish)
• Building your own flamethrower

Personally I’ve made this into a checklist of sorts. Not a “bucket list” of things to do someday, but more like a concert set list — things to be conquered in the near term.

Gurstelle wraps up Absinthe with a sort of memoir of great people and the common thread of danger that ran between them. From Churchill, to Edison, to Hunter S. Thomspson, danger (and apparently small quantities of explosives) seems to sew together the lives of great men and women. It’s his call to action — his sermon against apathy and risk aversion. If we would be great people, then we should be a little bit out there, nearer to the edge than is comfortable. He invites us to listen for “the strange music.”

With the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right…and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration.

Hunter S. Thompson
Hell’s Angels

Absinthe & Flamethrowers on Amazon
The official Absinthe & Flamethrowers website
William Gurstelle’s website

My wife rolls her eyes at me when I say this, but it’s a perfect description of my reading habits. I love literature, but I have never really been a reader. I love audiobooks and tear through many over the course of the year, but my rate of actual book reading is usually three books or fewer per year. So imagine my surprise when I tore through Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford in only three days.

Based on this recommendation on Fast Company’s website, I visited my local, soulless, chain bookstore to preview the book. Since how books are categorized in both libraries and soulless chain bookstores is completely lost on me, I collected a Nook brochure and asked for assistance at the desk. The computer told us Shop Class was located in the Philosophy section. That was a surprise, but having now traversed from cover to cover, it’s a completely appropriate classification.

I’m not going to attempt to rewrite Gadi Amit’s Fast Company summary as it pretty much sums up my enthusiasm for this book. In fact, the book goes so deep in so many areas, that any broad summary is going to be grossly insufficient. There’s too much there. Shop Class as Soulcraft is equal parts history lesson, hands-on work ethos, autobiography. deep-reaching philosophy and guidebook for reattaching ourselves to what we do. Crawford explores the deeper knowledge we gain through doing and questions the value we so often put on abstract understanding over practical know-how. Sure, I can understand how an engine works in the abstract, but it isn’t until I’ve held a greasy piston in my hand that I have the kind of useful knowledge only gained by doing.

Amit makes the case that Shop Class should be required reading for anyone pursuing a career in design. I would go further and say that it’s required reading for anyone about to choose any profession — especially one heavy in “knowledge work”. Beyond questioning the established notion that all young whippersnappers should be aspiring to high-paying corporate jobs in knowledge work or as part of the growing “creative class” of designers and design thinkers, this book explores the history of how these aspirations have unfairly degraded rewarding, well-paying trade professions that many people would actually find much more fulfilling. Jobs that are very, very difficult to outsource, he adds. A particularly eye-opening concept is his explanation of compensation. Big salaries are much more sinister when you consider that they’re generally paid only for jobs few people would ever take up out of passion alone. It’s like hazard pay for the soul. Would anyone ever choose to be an investment banker if it didn’t pay very, very well?

What I found most fascinating throughout is Crawford’s exploration of the history of how we used to work, how that changed and its ramifications for everything from what we learn in school to how we work in the professional world. In short, we’ve systematically separated thinking from doing and it’s transformed us into people who know how to use 12 forms of social media at once, but can’t use basic hand tools or even change our own oil. He uses automobile manufacturing as an example. Where it used to take a knowledgeable craftsman to build an automobile by hand (and in so doing he had to understand the entirety of the machine), Henry Ford separated thinking from doing on the assembly line — breaking down the whole sum of the builder’s knowledge into individual, less skilled tasks and transforming the building of a car into a segmented, consistent process. This isn’t evil, and Crawford makes no such inference, but it is the underlying mechanism which run amuck has caused whole skilled trades to go extinct and its conceptual perpetuation into corporate processes and management style for today’s knowledge workers adds insight into how so many people are compelled to work jobs they don’t actually like. They are motivated almost entirely through compensation. According to Crawford, it began in earnest with the craftsmen who built cars before Henry Ford’s assembly line.

Given their likely acquaintence with such a cognitively rich world of work, it is hardly surprising that when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913, workers simply walked out. One of Ford’s biographers wrote, “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personel, it was necassary to hire 963.”

This would seem to be a crucial moment in the history of political economy. Evidently, the new system provoked natural revulsion. Yet, at some point, workers became habituated to it. How did this happen? One might be tempted to inquire in a typological mode: What sort of men were these first, the 100 out of 963 who stuck it out on the new assembly line? Perhaps it was men who felt less revulsion because they had less pride in their own powers, and were therefore more tractable. Less republican, we might say. But if there was initially such a self-selection process, it quickly gave way to something more systemic.

In a temporary suspension of the Taylorist logic, Ford was forced to double the daily wage of his workers to keep the line staffed. As Braverman writes, this “opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs.” These anxious workers were more productive. Indeed, Ford himself later recognized his wage increase as “one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made,” as he was able to double, and then triple, the rate at which cars were assembled by simply speeding up the conveyors. By doing so he destroyed his competitors, and thereby destroyed the possibility of an alternative way of working. (This also removed the wage pressure that comes from the existence of more enjoyable jobs.) In 1900 there were 7,632 wagon and carriage manufacturers in the United States. Adopting Ford’s methods, the industry would soon be reduced to the Big Three. So workers eventually became habituated to the abstraction of the assembly line. Evidently, it inspires revulsion only if one is acquainted with more satisfying modes of work.

Crawford further expands on how the separation of thinking from doing — that is, the bulk of the thinking being done by a select group of upper-level engineers or managers and the bulk of the “doing” undertaken by people with only a basic understanding of their exact task — has crept up from manufacturing into “knowledge work” as well. I won’t attempt to summarize it, but I will say that it’s a fascinating history lesson with a series of keen insights.

As I tore through Shop Class as Soulcraft, I was particularly stirred to recognize that what I do as a designer seems to oscillate back and forth between having many trade-like, fulfilling qualities and sometimes a few of the soul-sucking “knowledge work” pitfalls described in the book. On the positive, the dynamic with my team is very much along the lines of what Crawford describes as a “crew” in reference to tradesmen of various expertise who come together for a common project. I’ve found this to be the case in pretty much every creative team I’ve ever worked on and it’s easily what makes creative collaboration so fulfilling — even if it isn’t always particularly hands-on. Now I can’t help but think of design work as almost one part electrician, one part sculptor. I particularly appreciated Crawford’s explanation of expertise as pattern recognition. Through the ongoing experience of doing the work, we start to pick up on patterns — patterns we then draw on intuitively on a daily basis. For me it lets me see what’s wrong or right with a design in ways that are sometimes difficult to articulate to other people. That is, it’s difficult to explain how I “know” that this doesn’t look right. Their eyes aren’t used to looking for what I see. For example, I was showing Photoshop Disasters to a colleague this morning and on most of the images, she couldn’t see many of the errors unless I pointed them out. How come they’re invisible to her and painfully obvious to me? Experience. More specifically, experience in doing that kind of photo manipulation for so many years. This disconnect shows up a lot in evaluating design work with clients. To them, my evaluations may seem arbitrary and subjective, and I have to remember that they probably can’t see everything I see. That puts the burden on me to build that trust so that they’ll come to rely on my eyes.

I really could just go on and on about Shop Class as Soulcraft, but I’ll end with this. I recommend its 238 pages to anyone open to deeper meaning in the things they do, be it professional or weekend DIY. Taken early enough, I think it can be both an inoculation against the cliche of the mid-life crisis and a renewal of the value of actually doing things with our own two hands.

Music recommendations are always really tricky because tastes vary so widely. Which recordings? The studio sessions? That one live show? That’s why I’m not recommending the music of Jonathan Coulton, per say. What I really recommend is the writing that goes into his music. I recommend his exuberance, his unapologetic nerd-i-tude, how his songs can be simultaneously so funny and so sad.

It would be easy to dismiss Coulton as a comedy singer in the vein of Flight of the Conchords or Tenacious D, but that’s missing the depth of his art, in my opinion. He’s not a comedy act. He’s a singer/songwriter who happens to be really, really funny sometimes. If you imagine David Sedaris as a buoyantly cheery sort of folk singer, then you’re getting closer to the bizarre genius of Coulton. He’s some sort of fantastic, humorist minstrel that’s really difficult to describe and really easy to enjoy.

I describe actor/comedian Eddie Izzard as someone “so funny that he can do european history humor” and it’s true — he can and does. Coulton is kind of like that. I haven’t come across any other songwriters who can write a catchy lyric about fractal geometry like Mandelbrot Set, a downright cheery sing-along about zombies like Re: Your Brains, a love song from the perspective of an evil mad scientist such as Skullcrusher Mountain, or so perfectly capture the plight of what it’s like to write software for a living as in Code Monkey. As I re-read that description, it almost sounds like kids’ music. Trust me, it’s not. Because of Coulton’s joyful First of May, I had to look up the meaning of “in flagrante delicto.” His lyrics are downright chewy sometimes and the complexity of songs like I Feel Fantastic and Creepy Doll reveal new jewels on each subsequent listening. This is not music dumbed down for the masses. These are anthems for your inner nerd. This is music so fun, yet so non-condescending, that you can’t help but have a better day.

I don’t think any further attempt at description would really do JoCo justice, so I’ll leave it at this. If you can scrounge up $12, head over to the iTunes music store and pick up Best. Concert. Ever. pronto. This live performance released in 2009 so perfectly captures his exuberance that I really can’t recommend it enough as the place to start. I can listen to its 20 tracks on nearly endless repeat. I love this album and I’m absolutely thrilled that The Mrs and I are going to see him live in October!

The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!
(I didn’t actually play Portal until this month. I know, I’m way behind.)

Jonathan Coulton’s Best. Concert. Ever. on iTunes.

For the unfamiliar, the premise of Dexter is easily the best concept fusion I think I’ve ever seen. We’re not talking The Mummy meats The Incredible Hulk. This actually works. There are stand out cop shows like FX’s The Shield. There are three iterations of CBS’s CSI forensic science franchise. CBS also has Criminal Minds, its very own FBI profiling show where each week they stalk and catch a new serial killer. Dexter is essentially the best parts of each of these kinds of shows all rolled into one. Dexter Morgan is a forensic blood spatter specialist working for the Miami Metro PD. He’s also [spoiler alert!] a serial killer. That’s actually not all that interesting until you add the third and best component. His fetish is killing killers. Using not only his professional acumen as a forensic scientist but his own natural ability to sniff out others “like him,” Dexter exacts his own twisted sort of vigilante justice on those who take lives. Meanwhile, he lives a carefully choreographed life to hide his sociopathy — his complete lack of real human emotions. This dichotomy — this double Dexter that only the audience gets to see — gives the show a dynamic unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. It’s the super hero’s alter ego re-imagined in a deliciously twisted way.

Dexter narrates his exploits in his own voice, bringing us along with him on the frightening yet strangely comfortable paths of his psychosis. We can’t help but pull for Dexter, but all the same, he’s a mur-der-er. Murder is bad, right? This central contradiction makes Dexter decadently delicious to watch. However, where the show really shines is in the depth, the complexity, and the authenticity of each of its key characters. The killer of killers bit is just the sizzle, the steak is in the characters and the fantastic way in which Dexter executes such an outlandish premise in such a completely believable way.

During the writer’s strike, NBC aired a neutered version of Dexter in prime time. Watching the original Showtime version on DVD, I just can’t imagine how it would have worked on network television. Not because it’s particularly graphic. I’d say CSI or even Heroes at times is just as graphic or more than Dexter. Gore doesn’t really relegate it to Showtime. The reason Dexter needs to be seen in its original Showtime glory is for the language. Frankly, it was so refreshing to have the police walk up to the aftermath of a truly horrifying death and someone actually ask “what the fuck?” Finally, adult television for adults.

So unless you just can’t stand the sight of blood or “motherfucker” shatters your delicate sensibilities, Dexter is easily one of the best TV series I’ve ever seen.