Dexter Television Program

High above Wilshire Boulevard, scenes from the pilot of "Dexter" were illuminating a tiny editing room. From a couch, Bob Greenblatt, Showtime's president of entertainment, considered the original version of the bloody series about a well-meaning serial killer -- and compared it to the revised version he'd made for CBS. CBS will begin airing the 12 episodes of Season 1, or at least parts of them, tonight in another sign of how the networks are tiptoeing into edgier fare.

When Kimberlee Heale was a little girl growing up in Covina and San Diego, she used to ask her father, a firefighter, to describe traffic accidents. By the time she took a tour of the FBI Crime Lab as an eighth-grader, she knew that a career in forensics was for her. "It was just the whole idea behind being able to put pieces of a puzzle together to figure out what somebody did," she says. "It was pretty interesting to me."

Three seasons in, do any of us really know Dexter Morgan? Showtime viewers have watched America's favorite serial killer earn acceptance from his long-lost homicidal brother and promptly end that relationship by slicing his neck with a knife. Then, Dexter allowed a woman, Lila, to get close to him, close enough for her to see who he really is, only to plunge a knife into her heart.

When viewers last saw Dexter Morgan, the charming vigilante serial killer had a few problems. He had been forced to murder his long-lost brother. His nice, normal girlfriend was starting to wonder what had happened to her ex-husband. A colleague at the Miami Police Department was stalking him to expose what he suspected was Dexter's secret double life. Dexter had learned that his foster father's code that allowed him to kill might have been a lie. And he had begun to experience something like. .

The biggest surprise of "Dexter" on Sunday night wasn't that Sgt. James Doakes was killed. Nor was it that his death was at the hands of Dexter's psychotic ex-girlfriend, Lila (Jaime Murray), rather than Dexter himself. What was most shocking was that it happened within the first 10 minutes of the Showtime series' season finale.

IT was "just one of those neurotic moments," Jeff Lindsay says, describing his inspiration several years ago for the novel "Darkly Dreaming Dexter," recently turned into "Dexter," Showtime's abnormal psych crime series. He was the luncheon speaker at his local Kiwanis Club in Fort Meyers, Fla., and as he sat at the head table, a thought suddenly entered his head: "Serial murder isn't always such a bad thing." No offense to the Kiwanians, he is quick to add.

SOMETIMES having a dirty mouth is all a lady needs. Jennifer Carpenter, the young actress who contorted herself acrobatically in "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," had never worked in television, but she really wanted to play the overly gung-ho cop sister of a serial killer who kills serial killers on Showtime's most-watched series, "Dexter." The night before her audition, Carpenter started feeling nervous when she was given 15 script pages to learn.

It's difficult to explain to someone who has never seen Showtime's "Dexter" why it is currently the most riveting and addictive show on television. When you try, you tend to sound a tiny bit psychotic. "It's about this guy named Dexter who works as a blood splatter analyst for the Miami Police Department but is also secretly a serial killer," you say, adding quickly, "except he only kills bad people, the kind the law can't touch. He has this code of honor and he's played by Michael C. Hall, who is just amazing because he makes Dexter kind of lovable and, well, you just have to watch it."