By Justin Ravitz

 By day, smooth Dexter Morgan is a forensics specialist for Miami Homicide, deconstructing Jackson Pollock-like blood splatters at crime scenes. By night he’s a sociopath, quelling his cravings by hunting and butchering serial killers too shrewd for sane dicks. He gets off on the chase, which usually ends with Saran Wrap, a metal table, sharp objects and a sanctimonious speech. As corny flashbacks explain, Dexter learned this from his foster father, a cop who urged his sicko son to “balance the books” and limit his massacres to baddies only. If only Jeffrey Dahmer felt such civic duty.

Slicing, dicing and narrating via this twitty moral logic, Dexter is played bemusedly by Michael C. Hall, who tinkered with corpses as mortician David Fisher on Six Feet Under. Red-headed, stubbly, loose-limbed and butch, Hall is barely recognizable, yet his predatory smirk is reminiscent of the carjacking crackhead who tortured David on Six Feet. Unlike Six Feet, however, the un-funny writing on Dexter (especially the Hallmark-inspired voiceovers) has little to do with the peculiarities of human psychology. Why doesn’t Dexter ever lose control and carve up a random hooker now and then?

Don’t forget the earlier, better material that haunts the rest of Dexter’s veteran cast, either. The extra baggage adds welcome heft and context to this new Showtime series, a PoMo, navel-gazing CSI Miami with half-baked thoughts on crime, justice and bloodlust. Dexter’s skittish girlfriend, Rita, is played by Julie Benz, once a diabolical vampire on the underappreciated Buffy spin-off Angel. Several of Dexter’s co-workers in the police department are alums of HBO’s Jacobean prison epic Oz (Lauren Vélez, David Zayas, Scott William Winters), a bloody, brilliant meditation on criminality and vengeance. Horror buffs will even note a walk-on by Amanda Wyss, slaughtered by Freddy Krueger in the original Nightmare on Elm Street. Death becomes these folks, even if they’re too dense here to detect the sexy killer with a box of donuts.

Death especially becomes Miami, perhaps the show’s most believable, three-dimensional character: its sweaty DayGlo colors pop like viscera, the Cuban pork and crab-legs are salty and pungent enough to taste, the gator-infested swamps gurgle like primordial ooze. Even as I stopped caring about Dexter's cartoonish doing-evil-to-do-good shenanigans, I considered booking my next vacation down in his seemingly funky nabe.