Parents’ Group Complains to CBS about “Dexter”

The Parents Television Council is a body that spends its time worrying about whether various TV programs are appropriate for kids. Its most recent complaint is against CBS and its Sunday night broadcasts of the quite brilliant show “Dexter.” PTC President Tim Winter issued a statement that read, “It is apparent CBS cares nothing for the children it’s influencing. CBS’ claims that it is only targeting adults with ‘Dexter’ are utterly false.” The problem, though, has more to do with parents than with CBS.

For those unfamiliar with the program, Frazier Moore of the Associated Press explained (before it premiered on Showtime in October 2006), Dexter “enjoys his job as a blood-spatter expert with the Miami Police Department. His foster sister, a Miami cop, looks to him for support in her own career. He has a girlfriend who, conveniently, is too traumatized from her abusive ex-husband to be interested in sex. (The last thing Dexter wants is intimacy.) He has a cabin cruiser and a home by the water. And a passion: He’s a serial killer. Dexter stalks and executes only the deserving. He is a self-styled safety net who catches, then eliminates, bad people the cops and courts have let slip through the cracks: ‘The ones,’ he sums up, ‘that think they beat the system’.”

CBS is broadcasting a sanitized (the “bad words” are omitted) version of the first season on Sunday nights at 10 pm. The show runs for about an hour with commercials (which sister network Showtime never had to consider), meaning that it’s 11 pm Sunday when the final drop of blood is spilled.

The PTC complains that the first week it was on, 157,000 viewers in the 2-11 age group were watching. That grew to 205,000 the second week. The increase, the PTC says, is clearly the result of CBS targeting that age group in its promotion of the program. Conveniently, the organization left out last Sunday’s figure – down to 180,000.

Naughty words, bare breasts and bottoms and gore probably aren’t appropriate viewing for 3-year olds, but some 11-year olds (what an odd choice of boundaries for this group) are certainly mature enough to deal with them. The moral ambiguity of a killer who murders other killers has a certain vigilante justice to it, though, and frankly, kids would be better off if they were taught early on that life is more often grey than black and white. At the same time, being up at 10 pm isn’t really good for kids either, certainly not when there’s school on Monday. Yet, whose fault is that? CBS isn’t the one setting bedtimes.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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