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Mixed messages swirl in the eddies of a changing tide. Showtime is premiering this new drama about a "serial killer you can root for." I heard the ad today on a country music radio station. The young lady giving me a haircut got excited. "I'm gonna love this!" she said, "I'm in school studying criminal justice and serial killers."

Michael C. Hall (no relation) who played the moody undertaker in HBO's Six Feet Under has the anti-hero's part as Dexter, a serial killing, morally void sociopath who, according to a CNN/AP article, "copes in a pro-social way."

The article points out that although Dexter, "stalks and executes only the deserving, a self-styled safety net who catches, then eliminates, bad people the cops and courts have let slip through the cracks," he is no Dirty Harry style vigilante. Dexter is unconcerned with righting wrongs, bereft of a moral compass, and is trying to honor a pledge to his foster father, a serial killer who left him with a mission: "We can't stop this, but maybe we can use it for good. There are people out there who do terrible things and the police can't catch them all."

Despite supposedly lacking morality, his first victim is a respected family man who tortures and kills little boys. He tells the doomed man that, "[Dexter] too is a conscienceless killer, but he would never harm kids." Then he murders the man with his power saw. Evil triumphs over evil, to do good? What a muddle. Rationality has little sway here.

An asexual dysfunctional girlfriend, a foster sister, and Dexter's day job as a forensic blood-spatter expert compose the setting for a classic bear-market anti-hero drama. 24, with its torture scenes, Deadwood, lesbian Batwoman, Sweeny Todd, and now Dexter. The creative pipeline must be packed with new, negative entertainment moneymakers for sale to a fear-hungry audience.

Market analysis led to the discovery of the socionomic principle, and the meanders of the Dow in the past weeks echo the whirling moral mix of this new drama. Social manifestations seem to be an accurate mirror of the markets right now.
-- Alan Hall

The story of a good guy serial killer, and the critics love it. Says the Boston Globe: “It's not a stretch to imagine the crime scenes in Dexter as a Vanity Fair photo spread. This fiendishly excellent new Showtime series turns blood spatter into a pop art form. The show rivals Nip/Tuck in sheer perverse visual wit.”

Two interesting reference points for the role and its star are Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, both of which were ground breaking shows in the first leg of the bear market.  For EWFF’s initial review of Six Feet Under see the Additional References section of the October 3 entry.

The Sopranos was similarly acclaimed when it appeared at the outset of the bear market. Here’s what EWFF said about it’s debut:
Ask the critics, and to a man, they will tell you that the best thing on television is The Sopranos, a series about a mob family that curses relentlessly and kills people casually. “No series,” says a typical reviewer, “has ever conjured the sort of rich ambivalence The sopranos sustains for its antiheroes.” The key words here are “ambivalence” and “antiheroes,” the hallmarks of moral evaluation in a bear market, as first described by our study, “Popular Culture and the Stock Market” in 1985.

Dexter "can only mimic human warmth -- bringing doughnuts to co - workers, courting the mother of two kids -- because he is a shell of a man.”  With a serial killer who is totally lacking in human emotion, producers are attempting to one-up the “ambivalence” of Sopranos. If they get it right, they’ll probably have a hit on their hands.