The news that CBS plans to import and present all 12 episodes of the first season of Showtime's Dexter, beginning February 17, isn't surprising. It's an excellent drama series, CBS is desperately short of inventory, and CBS owns Showtime. What could go wrong?
Glad you asked.
CBS, the network that launched the current era of abject fear of FCC reprisals by presenting Janet Jackson's infamous Super Bowl halftime show, doesn't need to court trouble, especially in an election year - when attacks against sex and violence on TV traditionally reach their zenith.
Yet here CBS is, presenting a prime-time series starring Michael C. Hall as a police crime-scene investigator who secretly is a serial killer - of other serial killers. Yes, it's an edited version, using alternate scenes and substituted dialogue filmed for eventual of-network syndication, but it's still so dark a subject, conservative watchdog groups are bound to have a field day.
They don't even need to see it to denounce it. That's the way they work - and many times, when they see smoke, the media help fan the uproar until there's fire.
My outrage, regarding CBS's scheduling of Dexter, is a little different. I've seen every episode of the series, and loved every minute - but every minute won't be shown by CBS. Not even close.
On Showtime, the average Dexter episode runs very close to a full hour. On CBS, the edited version, according to CBS and Showtime, will run no more than 48 minutes. That's 20 percent less Dexter in every episode. I'm sorry, but that's not serial-killer surgical precision, like Dexter's way with a blade. That's more like the wood-chipper body-disposal method of Fargo.
Millions more viewers will see Dexter on CBS than ever saw it on Showtime. Newcomers won't know what they're missing, and may even like what they see - especially if compared to such home-grown CBS fare as Cane and Moonlight and (shudder) Viva Laughlin. But Dexter was a more complete and mature work of art on Showtime. And CBS, by borrowing wholesale from cable, is sending a message that's ultimately self-defeating.
Thirty years ago, CBS presented a TV spinoff of the movie The Paper Chase, about law students struggling to make it through one grueling term after another. It was an outstanding show, but didn't attract enough viewers. It was so well-regarded, though, that PBS rebroadcast it - and, beginning in 1983, an upstart cable network called Showtime financed a revival of The Paper Chase, producing two new seasons of a former broadcast network series.
That was a little bit of TV history. Now, by presenting a full season of Dexter, CBS is making a little TV history of its own - in reverse. Yes, when the Fox network was young and scrambling for anything that people might watch, it also happily presented cable's hand-me-downs, from Showtime's It's Garry Shandling's Show to HBO's Dream On.
But a major network like CBS, turning over a valuable prime-time slot to a full season of a series seen already on cable, that's new. Good for cable. Good for Showtime. Good for Dexter.
For CBS, not so much.