11 TV Professionals Who Are Anything But

4. Detective Harry Morgan €“ Dexter

Harry Morgan, adoptive father to friendly neighbourhood blood spatter analyst/serial killer Dexter, is usually portrayed as a good father who did the best he could with a difficult situation. I'm not questioning that. I am however questioning the degree to which a cop who trains his son to channel his serial killer impulses into vigilante justice can be considered to be good at his job. And, while very little is going to top raising his son to be a serial killer (seriously, do therapists not exist in this world or something?), it probably wasn't the most responsible of career decisions to sleep with his informants.

Dexter was a brilliant show with an ingenious concept: a sympathetic serial killer working from inside the police. At its best it was morally complex, challenging and raised all kinds of questions about due process, justice, killing the guilty to prevent the deaths of the innocent, etc. Within the world of the show this was presented as For The Greater Good because of Dexter's habit of compulsively researching possible killers so his victims were definitely murderers themselves. But this falls down when you look at it in a real-world context. There have been enough cases of the police shooting the wrong person in the news lately to make the intelligent viewer question the myth of the beleaguered cop strangled by red tape.
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Kate Taylor has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing and an MRes in Creative Writing. Her nonfiction, reviews and other articles have appeared on Cuckoo Review and Mookychick as well as WhatCulture. Her fiction has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, Eternal Haunted Summer and in anthologies by Paizo and Northumbria University Press. She is 23 and lives in the North of England.