Michael C. Hall is still putting people six feet under, he's just leaving the embalming to someone else. This time around he'd rather slice and dice than comfort and console.

Dexter Morgan is a blood-splatter expert with a C.S.I. unit in Miami. He has a knack for understanding the criminal mind, which is no big shock, seeing as he has a criminal mind. He's a psychopath. The twist is that after he was orphaned at age four, his adoptive father, a Miami policeman, recognized the lad's tendencies and, in a fine instance of making lemonade out of lemons, taught the lad that he could remain good if he killed only evil people (a.k.a. the Bush doctrine).

And Dexter does polish off baddies, with relish (and, in terms of special effects, ketchup; lots and lots of ketchup). The murders on this show are bloody gruesome. A couple of times I shielded my eyes. The last time I saw something this repulsively violent on television was 16 years ago on Twin Peaks, when Leland Palmer killed Maddie Ferguson by banging -- and banging and banging -- her head against a wall.

And yet Dexter may be this autumn's best new TV series. Hall is an entrancing actor, and it feels like he was born to play this part: the pasty-faced, cold-hearted killer with the easy, superficial charm. The writing, which leans heavily on Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the Jeff Lindsay novel that created the character, is vivid. And, oddly enough, it's funny. When it's not gross, it's funny. There are great scenes between Hall and Eric King, who plays Sergeant Doakes, a homicide officer who is dead certain that Dexter is foul, even though everybody else in the precinct thinks he's a peach. (Why, a man who brings doughnuts can't be all bad!) Most of the humour, though, comes in situations that draw a contrast between Dexter's charming persona and his underlying beast, as when his very damaged girlfriend is, after many months, finally ready to make love, and all he wants to do is wheedle out of it, because he considers the act of sex neither moving nor dignified.

Disturbing and shocking, Dexter gives new heft to the term "guilty pleasure." But I think what will keep people watching through this season's 11 episodes is that Dexter has something to say about the human condition. Beneath its skin, it is about the impracticality of showing ourselves as we truly are; it is about the restraint that life's compromises ask of us, but also about the occasional release from that restraint. That's my best guess, and I may be wrong, but there's definitely something about Dexter that makes it hard to look away.

This is cache, read story here