A killer let loose on network TV

LYNN SMITH’s article was superb. The crime show “Dexter” has shown us that serial killers often make good police officers. What is it about that killer instinct that makes good cops?

I think if you can channel it – and it took Dexter Morgan a long time to channel it, as we well know – and mature with it, then I think it’s an attribute. You have to get past self-glory (that “it’s all me” and “it’s my gratification”) and make the transition to “a cause greater than yourself.”

Evan Dale Santos

Adelanto

HAVE we, as a viewing nation, sunk to such depths of depravity as to make a serial murderer the protagonist of a weekly TV drama? Moreover, this character is a police officer!

There are numerous studies that clearly demonstrate an association between what we view and how we behave. Suppose, just suppose, that somewhere one of these ticking human time bombs has had his fuse lit by a show that seems to legitimize mass murder?

Robert D. Russell

Kailua Kona, Hawaii

Road to recovery

“Death Spiral” [Feb. 10] did an excellent job of saying what we who are in recovery from prescription drug addiction already know all too well – the rampant and growing danger of Rx drug abuse among people in all walks of life.

Prescription opiates are every bit as dangerous as heroin, but our “pushers” are the physicians who, sometimes knowingly, sometimes out of ignorance or apathy, give them away like candy.

There is not yet any national Pills Anonymous organization (à la Alcoholics Anonymous), but there are 40-plus meetings that have sprung up independently nationwide and that network with one another via the website .

Twenty-one of those meetings are in Southern California, most of those started in the last five to 10 years.

Many prescription drug abusers, who are either still using or newly stopped, come to anonymous.com to hear the experience, strength and hope of its recovering members and also to find out if there’s a PA meeting near them and/or learn how to recover using the meetings of other substance abuse programs, even if their own primary problem is pills.

Jonathan B.

Sierra Madre

Kramer’s legacy

DENNIS LIM takes a cheap shot at deceased producer-director Stanley Kramer in his review of the new Sony film collection of Kramer’s work [“A Guest Who Just Won’t Go Away,” Feb. 10].

Lim declares “many of” Kramer’s films “suffered from a stiffness and simple-mindedness that was antithetical to convincing drama” – this about a film library that includes “Champion,” “The Men,” “The Caine Mutiny” and “High Noon.”

Lim lauds the dreadful ” … Mad World” which obscured the comic talents of no less than Buddy Hackett, Sid Caesar and Dick Shawn to name a few; only Buster Keaton managing a hilarious 30-second silent vignette. Lim savages “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” branding same “hokum” and “self-important” – this for a film nominated for 10 Oscars and garnering two.

Lim states that Kramer created a new “non-threatening black character who set the benchmark for on-screen minorities for decades.” Tell that to Woody Strode, Richard Roundtree or Sidney Poitier for that matter.

Stuart Weiss

Beverly Hills