Serial killers are, all things considered, perhaps not the most popular group in our society. It is considered that the brutal murder of your fellow man is not a particularly acceptable hobby when compared to, say, ten pin bowling.
TV has reflected this generally held view until very recently. Serial killers were universally portrayed as, well, bad. Unredeemable, psychotic, inhuman individuals with whom not a shred of sympathy is given nor a tear shed over. Then something rather strange happened.
First of all we had Showtime’s Dexter, a show which portrayed what is maybe the world’s first sympathetic serial killer, a Miami blood splatter expert (because sometimes psychopaths’ career choices are just painfully obvious) trained by his adoptive father to channel his sociopathic tendencies into the butchery of fellow murderers. Although Dexter is clearly portrayed through his internal monologues as a cold, dead, psychotically murderous wack-a-loon who feels completely alien in human society, viewers are encouraged to empathise with him. Indeed it all comes to a rather strange realization when you discover you have been actively rooting for Dexter the whole time, gleefully encouraging him as he dismembers the body of a recently deceased drug lord with a circular saw, and worrying for him when he looks close to capture.
This really comes to its head with the character of Sgt. James Doakes. An essentially hard working and committed, if a little overly serious, police detective who works with Dexter and suspects something may be up with the quiet, aloof fellow with an unhealthy obsession with pools of human blood.
The problem? The show seems to constantly encourage you to think Doakes is a massive arsehole. Why? Because he’s consistently mean to Dexter, who he assumes, CORRECTLY, I might add, to be completely bat-shit. So what does Doakes get in the end for all his trouble? He gets incinerated and framed for Dexter’s murders.
Next came Hannibal, featuring everyone’s favourite Lithuanian Cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Now Lecter’s certain sort of appeal started as early as The Silence of the Lambs, where Anthony Hopkins’ particular suave charm endeared the viewer ever so slightly to the character in a dark sort of way.
Hannibal is now portrayed by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, joining Will Graham as the latter’s psychiatrist and advisor as they proceed together with Morpheus from The Matrix to solve murders. Aside from his enormously gauche Windsor tie knots, Mikkelsen’s Hannibal is cool as you like: suave, sophisticated and generally a pretty helpful associate of Graham, who in this rendition is portrayed as an unstable, borderline autistic crack pot, who lives with an army of stray dogs. For this reason and because he, like Dexter, nominally works for the good guys, it is often easy to forget that he recreationally eats other people’s lungs in a hollandaise sauce.
There is ultimately an interesting moral question for whether it is healthy for television shows to willfully encourage their viewers to be positively disposed towards famous TV sociopaths. But frankly, I’m not sure whether I particularly care; both of these are fantastic shows, bringing new depth to a character type which was previously just a one dimensional bogeyman. After all, isn’t the most interesting thing about psychopaths that, ultimately, under all the disorder, they are still members of our species, maintaining a day to day façade of relative normality.
They are often not cartoonish monsters, but innocuously walk among us. Sleep tight York.