Pages tagged “showtime”

Another deliberately structured episode this week, as Miguel and Dexter’s relationship has devolved into a nasty rivalry more quickly than anticipated. It’s a treat and a relief for the show to revert back to the mode it’s in now, a breakneck, almost giddy series of suspense cues and constricting subplots that surged through the entire episode.

Amid a season that's proven the most concentrated effort yet to make Dexter about more than the kill, the last two episodes reverted back to the mode the series does best: pulp. Even as the domestic sphere continues to brew in the foreground, the focus has centered resolutely to Dexter and Miguel’s newfound game, which we now know is more evenly matched than we had thought.

Stan Lee’s influence has come to tower over the contemporary surge in comic-book adaptations, but even his expansive oeuvre has some underdeveloped patches. The 85-year-old touchstone has teamed with Showtime to develop a series, Hero, centered on the emergence of a gay superhero icon.

In our haste to dig into this season’s often listless narrative arcs, we’ve ignored some well-drawn work that has edged its way in. Margo Martindale (pictured) makes what will likely be her final appearance on the show this week as Camilla, the file clerk and old family friend who helped Dexter delve into his past in the first season. We learned she was terminal last week, and even if Dexter’s quest to find her the perfect key-lime pie was a pretty transparent ruse, her final hours (and Dexter’s unlikely part in them) were an ingenious way to explore mortality without the winking black humor that has become the show’s signature. Dexter’s final moments with her at the end of the episode are some of the season’s best.

We’re halfway through Dexter’s third season, and if this week’s episode felt a little inorganic, it served to clean up a series of plot points that had been unfocused over the last five episodes. Miguel’s brother is ostensibly out of the picture after Deb begins to share our suspicion about his connection to the Skinner murders (it isn’t him, alas), and Miguel is officially Dexter’s after-dark partner, albeit an apparently troubled one. Now we can get to the point, assuming there is one.

This week’s big reveal—that Miguel Prado suspected Dexter was more than a one-time vigilante—obviously should have come a few episodes ago. The Prado arc has frustrated fans and has never struck me as particularly viable to the series’ overall development, but now Miguel has an inextricable part in Dexter’s fate. The new subplot provides a much-needed foil to the developing domestic aspect of the series: for the first time, Dexter has someone who knows what he does, and that presents new possibilities as well as a potential threat.

So, uh, Dexter and Rita are engaged. Weird. The entire episode this week—as Dexter tried to convince her to accept his awkward, whim-induced proposals—felt out of line with the subtle shades that have developed their relationship over the last few seasons. She had a tentative place in the show early on, as if she could have easily left the cast, and it’s hard not to get the sense that she’s going to need to get a little more wind of Dexter’s nighttime activities for this to work. We’ll see.

Very much a transitional episode, this week’s Dexter spent more time progressing the season’s central plot than it did staking out new ground. The exception is that Dexter decides to stay with Rita and raise their child when it’s born, but who does that really surprise? Dexter’s father—who has been dead since before the show started—continues to show up in dreary flashbacks even now that we know about his past, so the show will inevitably find plenty of material in the idea of Dexter as a father.

The first two episodes of Dexter’s third season open with the kind of uncharacteristically contrived setups that brought the first two seasons to their hasty conclusions. In the premiere, Dexter (Michael C. Hall) is briefly at the cheeriest we’ve seen him in some time after he avoided detection late last season with the kind of dumb luck he’s been taught his whole life to avoid. His escape was liberating in that sense, with the mythology surrounding his father apparently settled and a new sense of possibility ahead of him.

In the flood of announcements that followed Diablo Cody’s overnight overexposure, perhaps the most persistent was the bond between the Oscar-adorned Juno screenwriter and Steven Spielberg. If we’re to believe the Hollywood lore, he even considered directing Juno at one point, and before long he had Cody attached as a writer on several of his fledgling projects.

[Above: Hailey with L Word co-star Erin Daniels]

Robert Greenblatt, president of entertainment at Showtime, announced at TCA this year that the network is working on a spin-off to their hit lesbian drama The L Word. With their popular show going into it's sixth and final season early in 2009, Greenblatt told reporters that he and Ilene Chaiken (L Word creator) were wanting to do a spin-off with one of the main characters, but wouldn't reveal which one and even said that no one in the cast was aware of the project yet.

Let's keep this business-like: Yes, the Weeds Season 4 premiere involved our dear dealer Nancy (Marie-Louise Parker) and the Botwin family fleeing to Bubbie-in-law's house. No, neither business partner Conrad and Nancy, nor drug king-pin Guillermo and Nancy, are to have any romantic future. Yes, Nancy will (supposedly) struggle more this season with ethical quandaries and find a new love interest. No, she will not be dealing harder drugs.

Showtime has picked up the Diablo Cody-penned sitcom The United States of Tara for 12 half-hour episodes, including pilot. As previously reported, Steven Spielberg is producing the endeavor that now will begin filming this summer. Showtime president Robert Greenblatt said he hopes to launch the show early next year, though there is no definite air date yet.