In contrast, at its best, “Dexter,” a show about a serial killer who kills serial killers, gets its audience filthy when they're not looking. So long as the good guys win at the end of the hour, one can eye the gorgeous blond girl naked on an autopsy table or listen to a story of rape without too much guilt or thought, rolling around in the prurient muck without getting dirty. On procedurals like “Criminal Minds” or “CSI” audiences are invited to thrill at the corpses of beautiful dead girls, the cameras lingering in faux-outrage that enables titillation. After all, to invert a saying, "When you die on television, everyone can hear you scream.” So there needs to be something, whether it’s life or death – something with high stakes.” There is nothing more high-stakes or noisy than a serial killer. Violence, according to Kurt Sutter, the creator of the sometimes very violent “Sons of Anarchy,” is a way to make a show “noisy,” to help it “ cut through everything else that’s similar to it. What is going on here? Serial killers are, obviously, extraordinarily good at violence, making them a part of the larger trend that has turned TV dramas, in the words of Time's James Poniewozik, " reflexively brutal." “Walking Dead,” “Game of Thrones” and “Breaking Bad” may not, as “Hannibal” did, contain a totem pole of corpses, but the Red Wedding, Gus Fring’s face and zombie carnage are also very capable of giving a child nightmares. “The Bridge’s” serial killer commits murders that are also performance art. The slayer on “The Killing” assembled a mass grave site where corpses in red body bags sat on the water like lily pads. Mikkelsen’s Hannibal Lecter is a pure aesthete, his murder an impeccable art form, as gorgeous and well-crafted as the cannibalistic meals he so carefully prepares. The psychopath and cult leader in “The Following,” played by the dashing James Purefoy, is lit from within by a passion for Edgar Allen Poe and desire to bring the "message" - “insanity as art” - to life. The killer in “The Fall,” played by former underwear model Jamie Dornan, draws women in his notebook and, upon their deaths, bathes and frames them in a scene so exquisite he will masturbate to it later. Sociopathy has become like consumption, a dangerous but romantic affliction that allegedly makes its possessor more passionate, more brilliant, more artistic and better-looking, even as it ties him inexorably to death. What happened to vampires over many decades - transforming from alluring but terrifying, deformed creatures of the night who want to suck your blood into soulful, gorgeous matinee idols who refuse to suck your blood - is now happening to homicidal maniacs, who have gone from looking like the crazed BOB of "Twin Peaks" or the assemblage of freaks and weirdos that appeared on “The X-Files” to “Hannibal’s” Mads Mikkelsen, a man with a face so gorgeously angular Picasso could not distort it. It’s not just that serial killers have never been so popular - they have also never been so smart, sexy, in control. And procedurals like ‘The Mentalist,” “Criminal Intent, SVU,” “NCIS,” “CSI” and “Bones” collectively offer up multiple murderers on a nearly weekly basis. NBC just premiered “Crossing Lines,” about a team assembled to catch the worst international serial killers, while on CBS, the FBI profilers on “Criminal Minds” do the same for domestic maniacs. “American Horror Story” featured a guy who skinned people and wore their faces. On “The Killing” a pair of detectives are looking for a man who has murdered over a dozen teenage girls, slicing their throats and chopping off a finger, while on FX’s forthcoming “The Bridge,” another pair of detectives will look for a killer who has meticulously planned murders that also speak to pressing social issues. “Dexter,” featuring the semi-sympathetic serial killer par excellence, returns to TV on Sunday night. “Hannibal,” “The Following” and “The Fall” star a trio of genius dreamboats who easily elude the more frail humans trying to catch them. Handsome, dangerous, mysterious men with an unquenchable thirst for blood have never been more common on television, and I am not talking about vampires.
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