‘Dexter’ premiere emotionally charged

It's remarkable, really, that it's taken this long. Four seasons. Dozens of murders. Hundreds of wry voice-overs about the joys of committing those murders. And only just today is "Dexter" (9 p.m., Showtime), a drama about a serial killer, not one of the best times you can have watching TV.

Nothing against tonight's season premiere. It's gripping, emotional and raw. It's just that it picks up moments after last season ended -- with Dexter's (Michael C. Hall) having found his wife, Rita (Julie Benz), bled out in the bathtub, murdered by the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow in an Emmy-winning turn) -- which doesn't exactly set the stage for madcap hijinks.

While the manner of Rita's demise may not be commonplace, the hour makes for the most stunningly realistic depiction of death's immediate aftermath I've seen since "The Body," the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode in which the young heroine returned home to find her mother dead from an aneurysm.

Dexter stumbles through the very real steps that follow such a crime, with his sister, Deborah (Jennifer Carpenter), picking up the slack. Planning the funeral. Choosing burial clothes. Cleaning up the scene, so thickly coated with blood it would've been easier to just paint the bathroom red. "I'm not used to having to be the strong one, you know?" Deb sniffles. "It's always been Dexter."

Dex, though, is more of a mess than ever. As he stands on his front lawn, surrounded by the detectives he works with as a blood-spatter expert for the Miami police, he finds himself on the wrong side of a murder for the first time in decades. As a 3-year-old, he watched his mother being slaughtered -- just as his infant son, Harrison, did with Rita -- an event that robbed Dexter of his humanity to the point that he's virtually incapable of expressing emotion.

"Everybody's looking," he says in a voice-over, "and it's the neighbor crying, not me." Granted, the neighbor was in love with Rita, going so far as to kiss her at one point, but still. Instead, Dexter is forced to keep telling everyone how upset he is, since he isn't capable of showing it.

Benz, who landed on her feet with ABC's superpowered "No Ordinary Family" (8 p.m. Tuesday, KTNV-TV, Channel 13), returns tonight for scenes that show Rita and Dexter's first date. Her flashbacks -- Rita hopes desperately that Dexter's the good man she's been dreaming of who will rescue her and her kids from her abusive, junkie ex-husband -- are filmed in almost a halo of light, giving her still more angelic qualities and making her death all the more heartbreaking.

After all, Rita's murder was a certified tragedy. Not in the way the word has become overused to describe anything bad that happens, but in the original literary sense in which a character is brought down by a fatal flaw. In this case, it's Dexter's seeing this somewhat normal life, one he never thought he could have, fall apart before his dry, unfeeling eyes, all because he didn't dispatch Trinity sooner. Instead, he toyed with his fellow taker of life, hoping he could learn from him.

"I was never really honest with you," Dexter confesses to Rita's corpse. "I'm a serial killer. That's what I am. I know I led you to believe I'm a human being, but I'm not."

Still, he's been doing a remarkably good job of disguising the evil inside him, fooling everyone except Detective Quinn (Desmond Harrington), who's likely not long for this world as he goes from having suspicions to launching an off-the-books investigation of Dexter. "Look, if this were anyone but Dexter," he tells Lt. LaGuerta (Lauren Velez), "we'd at least be thinking like detectives."

Things lighten up considerably, though, beginning with next week's episode.

"Dexter's" hallmark clever contradictions return: Just as a crisis counselor tells Dexter that despite the horror he witnessed, his young son should be "perfectly fine," Harrison pulls the head off a doll.

Julia Stiles turns up as an interesting complication in Dexter's life.

And Deb soon gets back to being her deliciously blunt and far-from-printable self. Even though her playing house with her big brother now that he's a single dad of two, possibly three, ruined kids adds an unfortunate subtext to those scenes when you know Hall and Carpenter are married.

But Rita's death still casts a pall over these early episodes as well, and it probably will for some time.

The good news, though, is that while Dexter may not have learned how to feel, "Dexter" most definitely has.

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Sundays. E-mail him at clawrence@ reviewjournal.com.