10 TV Villains You Didn't Realise Actually Won

Hats off to Showtime's Dexter, few could have imagined Jon Lithgow would be so effective at throwing C-bombs and murdering young women in the bath. In reality, his performance elevated Season 4 to what is universally considered as the show's greatest achievement.

As Dexter gets caught up in tracking a new 'monster', his path crosses that of Arthur Mitchell, a seemingly charming family man whose hobbies include building houses for the needy, early mornings and resolving childhood trauma by killing people in threes.

As with the majority of 'big bads', Mitchell is eventually clingfilmed to a table while Michael C. Hall glares so intensely it looks like his head is about to explode. Dexter gets his murder fix, but it is also revealed that Trinity got his. Rita, Dexter's wife, is killed leaving the loveable serial killer as a single parent. From here, the following seasons show Dexter's life (and the show itself) unravelling to the point where driving a boat into a hurricane seemed like a good idea.

Mitchell didn't mind being killed - he'd attempted suicide previously, so Dexter did him a favour. In return, The Trinity Killer destroyed doting daddy Dexter's carefully constructed life. Everything that happened from then on was a result of Arthur Mitchell's shocking season-ending bloodbath.

It takes a hell of a villain to completely overshadow seven years of entertainment (well, four years of entertainment and three years of... yeah).