There are some characters on TV we empathize with, there are few who make us think, there are a couple we antagonize with, but none has made an audience question their morality like Dexter.  The award winning series, previously aired on Showtime, is finding a new life thanks to NUVOtv, the premiere English language network for Latino entertainment and its Chief Creative Officer, Jennifer López.  You can catch two back to back episodes of Dexter every Monday night at 9pm.

The plot of the series revolves around Dexter Morgan, played by Golden Globe winner Michael C. Hall, a blood analyst at the Miami Metro Police Department who solves crimes during the day and commits them at night.  Puerto Rican actors Lauren Vélez and David Zayas, Lieutenant LaGuerta and Agent Batista respectively, not only inject the Latin flavor to the show, but both characters are key components to its success. Zayas, who began his career doing theater in New York, knew the moment he read the script, he wanted to be part of such an original concept “I thought the script was brilliant. I didn’t know how it would be received, but I wanted to be part of it. I thought it was an exciting concept.” Vélez, who has worked many times with Zayas before, first in the Labyrinth Theater and later in Oz, wasn’t so sure, “I remember vividly when I first heard about it, and I thought it sounded very edgy, a little scary and I was looking for something a little bit lighter. But after I read the script I was blown away.” 

It is not every day that you see complex roles for Latinos on American television, and that is something very important for NUVOtv and the actors.  “What caught me about the story was that they kept the integrity of the characters that were Latino, and they were in a position -like detective, like a lieutenant, like a district attorney- and they maintained that for the most part throughout the eight years, and that is something rare. You don’t see that on television too much,” explains Zayas.  “There’s going to be a whole new demographic of people, particularly Latinos, that are going to identify with Latino characters and also recognize the cultural effects of it, how they deal with family, how they deal with work. It’s going to be familiar to them and that’s a wonderful thing about NUVOtv.” And this is not exclusively for Latinos.  “I was very proud of the fact that I was part of a show that maintained the diversity of ethnicity, because it just wasn’t Latinos, Masuka was Japanese- American, and we had many African-American characters. It was multi-ethnic and that was an important aspect for me.” 

The topic of ethnicity for Velez is a bit more complex because of her gender. She is playing a Latin woman in a powerful position, a lieutenant in charge of all the men, and even though her character antagonizes with Dexter a lot, she is ‘the good cop’.  “What I think about LaGuerta is that she was written very brilliantly, but I tried to bring a lot of heart to the character and tried to have people understand that -often times a woman in power is looked at if she’s too aggressive or assertive looked at if she’s a bitch, she’s a horrible woman, she’s mean -all of these qualities that people would not assign to men, but because she’s a woman she’s more subject to that sort of scrutiny.” She adds:  “I just wanted people to see her as a human being, not just somebody who was ambitious and wanted to get ahead, but somebody who really believed in something.  That was really my quest, just to make her as human and understood as possible.”  And that’s exactly why this show is so popular.  It’s about understanding these characters who are going through extraordinary situations in their life before the audience get the chance to pass judgment on them. To the point that the more we watch, the more we agree with Dexter and his murders.

Vélez believes part of the huge success of the show is how the character of Dexter has been developed throughout the whole series and how he reacts to his surroundings, “The assumption is that because he is a serial killer he’s going to be the one that seems more out of place or just obviously something dangerous, and he is so mild-mannered in comparison to everyone else he’s surrounded by, including his sister, and I think it’s a great diversion just having his Dexter normal, everyday self be so different than the serial killer side of him, and everyone else who orbits around him just has their own different, loud issues.”  Zayas agrees.  He thinks that the show is not about a serial killer, but about the circumstances, motivations and rationality of Dexter.  “I think that you see a show about a serial killer, your initial reaction was this man is bad.  This man is evil.  And in watching this show and watching how they’ve created this character, it is not black or white.  You do go on the journey with him.  There are aspects of his decisions that you agree with, not that you condone what he does, but you start agreeing.  You start seeing his world the way he sees it, and you start to understand—not what he’s doing is right—but you start to understand how his brain is working, and you start to understand how society is affecting that.”  

Although Dexter created a huge fan base and was the number one show on Showtime while it was airing, the finale was highly criticized by the audience.  Zayas reacts: “As an actor, I’ve always found that my job is not to judge the content in which I’ve agreed to perform in.  What I try to is just find the truth in every moment that they’ve written.  It’s not my place to determine.  It’s not a matter of me being happy or not.  It’s a matter of me performing what they’ve written, the story they come up with, to the best of my ability and find as much truth in it as possible.”

So before we get to the end, tune in to watch the beginning.