As Seen on TV is a new weekly series of blog posts I’ll be doing in response to reading/dissecting the pilot scripts of various television programs, both old and new, and then watching or re-watching the pilot episodes they spawned, whenever appropriate.

Week One: The WB’s Supernatural
Week Two: AMC’s The Killing

Warning: spoilers up to episode 1×04 of Dexter are inevitable

This installment of ASoT is going to be considerably different than the last two because I just started watching Dexter last week and I’m only up to episode four. I haven’t read the Jeff Lindsay novel it’s inspired by either.  As a result, I can’t really speak in broader terms of series-long or even season-long arcs—spoiler-phobe that I am, I can only guess where the story might be going. This week will also differ due to the overall tone of the series.  I didn’t plan the line-up this way, honest, but Supernatural and The Killing share a lot of the same viewers—and their respective fandoms seem to overlap quite a bit from what I’ve observed.  Given some thought, it’s easy to see why.  Despite the differences between the two shows (many of which I outlined last week) both are heart-wrenching and at times devastating dramas with a pair of brooding leads who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.

From the first page of Dexter’s pilot script, it’s painfully clear that we have a different kind of animal on our hands…