Smits’ Dark Side on ‘Dexter’ is a revelation
The day after Election Day, a friend and dedicated student of the television arts couldn’t wait to call and remind me that Barack Obama was the long-reported model for Jimmy Smits’ character Matt Santos in the final season of “The West Wing.” And, just as Democratic congressman Santos won the presidency from the crusty, maverick, truth-spewing Republican played by Alan Alda, the outcome in the real world echoed TV.
It was, then, life imitating art imitating life.
In life, Smits is an actor and nothing else. He pays Screen Actors Guild dues and puts his pants on one leg at a time, no doubt.
On TV, though, he is liberal heroism personified and has been for decades — first on “L. A. Law,” then doomed cop Bobby Simone on “N. Y. P. D. Blue” and finally, in pure uncut hero form as the embodiment of political virtue (the true heir of Jebediah Bartlett) on “The West Wing.”
Granted, Smits was the rum mogul and patriarchal sleaze on the atrocious short-lived soap “Cane,” but the show was so bad (it even looked ugly), that it was one of those things people try to ignore even while they’re watching it.
And now courtesy of Showtime, Smits has my nomination for the most hair-raising fictional character of the season on “Dexter,” the 9 p. m. heart of Showtime’s monster Sunday block of Prime Time Bad Boy TV (which begins at 8 p. m. with “Brotherhood” and ends with “Californication” at 10 and 10:30 p. m.). In 2008, it is, as NBC used to say of its Thursday lineup, “the best night of television on television.”
And, at the heart of it all is Smits in the creepiest actorly turn to the Dark Side that I’ve seen in decades. It’s a little like watching, in fictional form, O. J. Simpson’s metamorphosis from America’s most accommodating and beloved football hero into its most loathed double murder suspect.
For those non-Showtime folks who have somehow missed the nasty occluded universe of Showtime’s “Dexter,” the show is based on a series of novels by Jeff Lindsay about a vigilante serial killer who always insists that his victims be the scum of the earth.
When this year’s plots on “Dexter” began to weigh in — Dexter’s pregnant girlfriend, the Miami prosecutor (Smits) who doesn’t know Dexter is the one who killed his no-good brother and insists on being his friend — I scoffed.
Rather a lot.
No more. I’m now cheering louder at the end of every new episode. The show is stupendous this year and all because of the Smits plotline which is the darkest investigation of human behavior to hit TV in ages. The whole errant folie a deux with Dexter and his apprentice vigilante comes to a head tonight as we see just how attracted to slaughter Smits the prosecutor really is.
Nor is that all. Showtime’s “Brotherhood” — whose political dimension has always made it far more unsettling than “The Sopranos” — is still the best show on TV.
Unlike “The Sopranos,” “Brotherhood” is usually solemn and not at all given to black-humored attention to Jersey boy thug comedy in the back of pork stores. Nevertheless, this year’s “Brotherhood” had my favorite TV drollery of the year thus far: mobster Freddie Cork, released from prison finds his funds so frozen and his assets under such Fed scrutiny that he’s stone broke and actually needs to work.
So he goes to an automobile dealership he secretly owns 20 percent of, just for the salary. He intends to do nothing at all but sit around all day disdaining everyone else. Instead, the majority owner prevails on him to actually get out and pretend to sell a car.
The scene where Cork, the mob chieftain, dazedly comes back to his office after discovering that he actually has a natural gift for selling cars is, I swear, the most satisfying joke I’ve encountered on TV all year.
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