Wire Transfer

In the pilot episode for Dexter, one of television’s most unconventional series, a seemingly decent police forensics scientist, played by Six Feet Under’s Michael C. Hall, leads an unspeakable double life: he’s also a serial killer.

Within five minutes of episode one, we watch as Dexter kidnaps and takes his first victim to meet the faces of the children he is accused of molesting and murdering. Dexter has kindly dug up the kids from their makeshift graves himself.

“Children, ” Dexter confesses to the man. “I could never do that.”

“Why? ” the man replies.

“I have standards.”

With that final proclamation, Dexter proceeds to cut the man to pieces, disposing of him with a clinical efficiency befitting a forensic scientist. By the end of the pilot, one comes to the conclusion that Dexter is actually quite an affable chap. Rarely has a mass murderer been portrayed so sympathetically.

When Dexter returns to paid Canadian television on the Movie Network at the end of September, it will help herald one of the most original periods we have seen on the small screen in decades — perhaps ever.

In a race to declare the death of one mass media fad and the beginning of another, many writers have rushed to recite the eulogy for traditional television. Yet for all their bluster about the mobile revolution and the future being on YouTube, the vast majority of North Americans are still getting their nightly entertainment from television. According to a 2006 Nielsen Media Research study of audiences in the United States, the average household actually increased the amount of time it spent watching traditional TV by more than twenty minutes last year. Nonetheless, the technological changes that have facilitated “television on demand,” combined with the proliferation of portable wireless devices, portend a shift in the way television is viewed that may ultimately make television an even more appealing medium for serious writers, directors, and actors. Ironically, it may be the iPod and iPhone generation that pushes television over the threshold into an authentically literary art.

This winter, television aficionados will welcome back for the final time one of their most treasured hbo programs: The Wire. As you poll the fawning media coverage for the show — a writer for the New York Times claimed that “if Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch The Wire, unless, that is, he was already writing for it” — you realize immediately it deserves to be placed in the pantheon of great television.

The Wire is based on the stories and experiences of a former homicide detective and schoolteacher, Ed Burns, and a crime reporter, David Simon, both of Baltimore. Its theme is that the life cycle of violence in this neglected city extends from one generation to the next, fed by one big dysfunctional family: the education system, the police force, a corrupt and divided political culture, and the war on drugs. The show’s final season will examine another element in this life cycle — the media.