Dexter - Series 1 to 3 DVD Box Set

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With police procedural shows ever popular on American TV and the forensic procedural becoming a niche that could rule the world, it’s pretty much a safe bet that a series about a blood spatter analyst will make a good impression. Dexter delivers on this premise excellently, with a stylish blend of blood science and psychoanalysis that can tell you not only what happened to the victim, but why. Ultimately, though, that leaves us with yet-another-CSI, a show where our titular Dexter fights crime and, time and time again, wins. Thankfully, that’s not what Dexter is really about.

You see, the Miami of Dexter is a place where police work fails. Bad guys do bad things to good people, and more often than not, they walk free at the end of the day. For Dexter (Michael C Hall), this simply will not do. He’s vehemently defensive of the people around him, including his sister Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) and his colleagues at the station - and they rely on him, time and time again, to find the evidence that’ll put their perp in the can. It’d be easy to assume that an intelligent man like Dexter takes the moral high ground. And then he claims his first victim.

Dexter is like Batman with a knife and a place to dump the bodies, a vigilante killer whose appetite for murder is, conveniently, restricted to bad people. Increasingly, though, the rules become bent by circumstance, forcing Dexter to become reckless, involved, instinctive. It all gets very personal - and Dexter must question the moral code that has, so far, defined his life.

Of course, there’s still a fair amount of policing to be done, albeit work that’s complicated by Dexter’s need to cover his own tracks. Each season focuses on a series of individual murders that feed into a bigger case which unfolds over the twelve or so episodes as the cops of Miami Metro search for a killer - all the while missing the one sat next to them. Moments of bloody violence are par for the course, but part of what makes Dexter such an outstanding piece of drama is that it never takes itself too seriously and it always willing to crack a joke, often at the most inopportune moments.

Dexter is truly a show that takes the forensic genre, cuts off its head and reassembles the body parts in new and interesting ways. It’s a ridiculously stylish piece of work, presented here with the first three seasons in their entirety.