The Best Series On Television

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall:

"But then Six Feet Under, for my money at least, turned out to be one of the best, arguably even the best (though I'm not sure I'd quite give it that superlative) television series ever created

Even so, I had a similar feeling when I saw that Showtime had picked up Six Feet's Michael C. Hall for Dexter, an oddly comic drama in which the protoganist[sic] is a serial killer -- clearly the dramatic Everest on the terrain of humanizing the vile or socially shamed.

(Hall was David, the gay brother in Six Feet.)

Now, this would seem hard to pull off. After all, while serial killers get a bad press, most of us tend to believe it is deserved. But it is an amazingly good show. And I have to confess that I fell under its spell after one episode. And I've pined through each week waiting for the next episode..."

It's a familiar wait-- the long days and nights until the next episode of Dexter rolls around... like the long waits in the first and second season of Tony and Friends (The Sopranos). Dexter is the best series on television right now.

I'll take exception to Six Feet Under, though. The first season was brilliant but after that it made the great dramatic error (think Northern Exposure) of become self-aware of its own quirkiness and perhaps becoming too impressed with its own ponderous self-importance (see the original incarnation of Battlestar Galactica for further illumination)

...On a semi-related note, TV's best doctor show, House, is being corrupted by an insipid subplot involving an irritating cop who is attempting to bust House for drugs by intimidating all the doctors and a major metropolitan hospital. Lost is more grounded in reality than this plot-line. I do hope I don't have to quit watching House in order to avoid this idiotic distraction. (I can find plenty of power-mad law enforcement officials without searching too hard if I need a fix of that reality.)