I do love Dexter. And I haven't put any music up on this blog yet. So here's a tribue to the Dexter theme by Ben Ezra, found on the mighty Jamie Noguchi's Angry Zen Master.

Those of you who know me know how much I love Avatar: the Last Airbender. Because I will have told you repeatedly and at length.

Now, finally, after three years off the air and one disappointing live-action movie directed by M. Night Shalama-lama-ding-dong, they're making a proper follow up. I am ridiculously excited. It's a kids' show, true, but it's one of my great guilty pleasures, along with animated Disney movies.

The great thing about Avatar is how fully-realized the world is. Rather than going for the standard-issue cod-medieval Western European fantasy setting, a la LoTR and its many imitators, they decided to take the standard-issue Eastern setting (A la Journey to the West) and run with it like crazy. It worked, mainly because they struck the right balance between respectfulness and daring. The writing's the best I've ever seen in any children's show ever. It's effortlessly fluid, the characters speak and react like real people, the villains are sympathetic and the situations have genuine danger, (which is the hardest thing to get right in any show, but especially one for children).

It's the kind of writing that's usually stymied by the producers' fear of what the parents will say. Bur in Avatar they got one thing right, and everything flowed from that: They gave us a hero, indeed, a group of heroes who were unambiguously heroic and good, whilst remaining human. They were never preachy, they were never over-the-top; they were just good people trying to make it in a difficult world.

And I think that's a bolder decision than it seems in this day and age. When you decide to make your heroes Good, it means you're taking a moral stance, which is the great no-no of relatavistic culture. In most modern adult television, we've come to like our heroes flawed. In some shows, like The Wire, that's perfect for the material. In others, like, say Angel, the moments of anti-heroism were irritating, as the show was clearly about Good versus Evil, and the writers seemed embarassed about it. The Battlestar Galactica remake was a particularly egregious example. The tone was unremiitingly bleak, and characters were wildly swinging between the opposite ends of moral spectrum with giddy abandon. What the producers are saying when they put out a show like that is: "Look, this is how it is! Man is an animal, willing to kill for scraps! Behold!"

But what you say when you put out a show like Avatar is: "There are things about humanity that are worth celebrating and defending." And oddly enough, in our strangely self-loathing times, that is a revolutionary act.

 Or maybe it's a kids' show about chop-socky kung-fu mayhem. What do I know?

*EDIT*

The wonderful Jamie Noguchi of Angryzenmaster , has more to say.