LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! Dexter, Kenny Powers, And Hard Choices

LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! is a series of pieces looking at what fiction writers can borrow, craftily, from other sources. I will mostly look at television, movies, and comics, though the occasional literary work may squeak its way in, as will a song or two. LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! finds useful inspiration in unlikely places.

Last week’s LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! was about learning from the new film Gravity. This week, I want to look at a different kind of learning: learning what NOT to do.

Learning from mistakes is one of the best skills you can acquire. We’re told constantly as kids to learn from our own mistakes, but this is advice most of us don’t actually heed until we’re out of our twenties. (This is one of the many reasons why I don’t trust anyone under thirty.) Something we do far earlier, though, is learn from the mistakes of others. How strange, then, that when we enter a course of study — formal or not — in a creative field, we seem mainly to look to the work of our betters. There’s a lot that can be learned from where things go wrong.

The TV series Dexter and Eastbound & Down were, in their first seasons, shows I loved. Dexter was goofy and unbelievable, but it had real style and in its protagonist — a serial killer with a strict moral code — it had a fascinating character, played with a lot of complication by Michael C. Hall. Eastbound was stupid-raunchy and never seemed sure if it was a dark satire of bro-ness or an overly broad buddy comedy, but in washed-out major leaguer Kenny Powers it had a certain something.

(Here’s what Eastbound & Down has: if you grew up in a small town or rural area, you knew a lot of Kenny Powers types. But I suspect every community has that person who talks tough, then makes a million transparent excuses for why he can’t back it up.)

The first seasons of these shows were pretty great. Eastbound & Down, in particular, makes a terrifically ballsy choice in the end. Kenny’s about to take April, the genuine love of his sad, shallow life, with him to training camp for his major-league comeback. At the last minute, he gets a call: the recruiter who promised him a spot was a cokehead who had no real authority to hire Kenny. So Kenny, who’s just made a huge show of leaving his hometown behind for the second time, heads off with April while keeping his new secret to himself. They stop at a gas station. April goes inside. When she comes out, her bags are sitting by the gas pump. The last shot is head-on: Kenny driving off down the road alone, face filled with genuine shame and anguish.

It’s a great ending, and I secretly prayed that would be the real ending to the show. I didn’t want or need to see any more Kenny Powers. The show had given me everything, and the sixth and final episode was good enough to negate any of the overly broad stuff that’d come before (like Will Ferrell’s all-too-self-aware villain). It really was a special show, at six episodes.

Then it came back. And we had a new season of Kenny living in Mexico. Then another season after that of Kenny in Myrtle Beach. Then the current season of Kenny back in his hometown, married to April, and still pining for fame. Each season of Eastbound & Down has featured increasing levels of surface-level craziness with diminishing returns in the introspection department.

This was, in season one, a show about a man who believes it’s his destiny to be a celebrity, despite everything reality is telling him. Which, to me, is a fantastic premise with a great, driven-and-damaged main character. Now it’s a show that’s still about that guy, but every season after the first has seemed to celebrate this. More about that in a moment.

Dexter also dropped off after season one. Season two featured the rise of two new theories in Dexter’s head: 1) that his murdery nature is a “dark passenger” that rides with him always; and 2) that he’s not unlike a superhero. Either of these ideas would make for interesting character work if the show hadn’t, at the same time, adopted these same ideas about Dexter. In other words, the first season of Dexter was about a driven and damaged main character, but every season after the first has seemed to celebrate this. Hm!

Here’s what happened. Both shows stopped being interested in what’s true about their main characters and both shows began paying too much attention to what people liked about those characters. You can’t have it both ways. In the pilot of Eastbound, Kenny throws a tantrum in front of his brother’s family, then apologizes to them — but he yells the apology at the exact same volume as the tantrum. That’s funny because it’s true. Jesus, I’ve done that. But in later seasons he’s punching people and wrecking things and saying horrible things to women and minorities because that’s what a certain segment of the audience responded to in Kenny. This guy’s outrageous! I do believe Danny McBride and company are very aware of the ridiculousness of Kenny, but I think they’ve also become unwilling (or perhaps been network-pressured) to make the hard choices about who Kenny is and what their story’s about.

You see this in music all the time, by the way, where a band will clearly have thought: “Oh, you loved THIS thing on the first album? Here’s a whole second album of THAT same thing. Awesome, right?”

Let’s put it this way: Breaking Bad never made this mistake of writing to their audience. The Sopranos didn’t either, but in later seasons David Chase and his writers went the other way, often seeming to write to spite and taunt a segment of their the audience. Which, in the end, amounts to the same thing. As soon as you write only for those who “get it,” you’re no longer writing for your characters. Breaking Bad tips its hand a little during Walt’s amazing phone call to Skyler, where so much of his dialogue could have been taken verbatim from nasty message-board postings about what an ungrateful bitch Skyler White was. Yet, though those people may have made up a significant portion of Breaking Bad‘s ever-increasing audience, the show still never wrote for those people. It stayed true to its characters and its story.

I didn’t quite catch on to the dark passenger/superhero thing in Dexter when it happened. What killed the show for me was the end of season 2. Dexter’s support-group sponsor/girlfriend Lila, who learns his secret and still wants to become his acolyte, escapes to Paris in the last episode, after killing the one cop who’d figured out his department’s crime-scene analyst is also a serial killer. I thought: Okay, good. She’s learned some things about Dexter, she’s the one person left who knows who and what he is. This will provide some real stakes and tension for the coming season(s). We’d thought Sgt. Doakes would be the one who knew Dexter’s secret, but now it’s this other person. Great! Then, in literally the last minute of the season 2 finale, Dexter shows up in Lila’s Paris hotel room and kills her.

What’s wrong with that? Well, because it just erased the one person who could do damage to the show’s hero. It erased the risk, wiped the slate completely clean. And it telegraphed something disquieting that would become the modus operandi for this show: Dexter’s not just the hero in the classical protagonist sense, he’s now the Hero. We’re now supposed to root for him, with no reservations or complication. Which is insane, because he’s a horrible human being. And the show stayed true to this mode for the remainder of its run, never seriously calling into question the notion of whether it’s okay to kill anyone, even people who’ve also killed. Never really challenging this character’s belief that he’s doing the right thing. The series finale pulls maybe the biggest bunt I’ve ever seen in a finale, one that might be even worse than “it was all a dream!” Gah.

So this is the takeaway here: You have to remain true to your character, and you have to make the hard choices. You can’t think about what will upset people or turn people off. If your character is real and true and interesting, they will remain fascinating. Your readers and viewers will follow you anywhere. If you compromise any of this, you will find yourself not with a character but a caricature. And like those drawings you get on the boardwalk where your prominent nose is now 1/3 of your head, who doesn’t love a caricature FOR EXACTLY THIRTY SECONDS?

I watched shitty Dexter to the end, and I will watch not-as-shitty-but-still-horribly-compromised Eastbound & Down to the end, too. Partly out of compulsion, but mostly because I need to understand every terrible mistake these shows are making so I can, the good lord willing, never make those same mistakes. Writing is about choices, and the choice to keep your character unblemished or unexamined is one of the very worst ones.

(P.S. As I look this over for spelling errors and odd syntax, I realize I could’ve just written EVERY SEASON OF THE SIMPSONS AFTER SEASON 9 and been done with it.)