I don’t blame my foster parents for that. Harry and Doris Morgan did a wonderful job raising me. But, they’re both dead now. I didn’t kill them. Honest. Dexter.
As a general rule, for movies but especially also for TV shows, voice-overs should be on the “to avoid” list. Show, don’t tell, after all: it’s a difficult rule to follow, but that doesn’t mean you should give up and resort to a cheap trick. Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy… All of these shows use prominent voice-overs, and all of them would be better of without them. After all, the only use the voice-overs serve is to make themes -that usually worked perfectly well as an undercurrent- dreadfully explicit and unevocative.
However, there are exceptions to every rule. And when your show revolves around a main character who fakes all his emotions, who lives his entire life hiding who he is and what he’s thinking… a voice-over starts sounding like a reasonable thing. And luckily, in Dexter, not only is the voice-over pretty essential, but it’s also really well executed. For instance, it’s not particularly literary: it doesn’t have the pat, too rounded style many TV-voiceovers do, and it isn’t filled with cringe-worthy puns. It’s just a man talking to himself, to an audience he sort-of wished he had (and which, of course, he in fact does have in us).
Of course, I let my original thought take me on a wild rant, so let me get back to the basics: a plot synopsis (spoiler-free, as promised). Read the rest of this entry »
