Walt's Formula in Application to a Sociopathic Serial Killer

So… This is almost completely irrelevant to anything and everything, but I find it interesting, so I'm going to discus it here anyhow, and you can choose to ignore and not read it like anything else that I write…

"Walt's formula" is a very important concept that is used, not just in fairy tales (especially now, and especially in Hollywood) and is a list of necessary actions and devices utilized in order to activate internal biases of the populace and, in turn, make successes out of the productions. One in particular that makes me laugh is, for those of you who have seen it and those that have not as well, Dexter, a series on HBO if I'm not mistaken. Anyhow, as a brief overview for those unaware of the cultural pop icon—although you clearly have bigger problems that I cannot fix if you are not in tune with your own generation's pop icons—Dexter is a relatively new show that was meant to be provocative and edgy. The way the creator achieved this was by making the title character, Dexter, a sociopathic (formerly termed psychopathic for those of you that have better acquaintance with one term over the other) serial killer.

Problematic Aspects of the Premise:
1) The main character must be a protagonist. People get distressed if they follow a negative character or insignificant character for too long.
2) Protagonists must be likeable and have generally good qualities. Bad qualities in any protagonist should be mitigated and justified as much as possible, lest the protagonist become unlikeable by a greater demographic.
3) The villain(s)—in this context a different category from antagonist—must be clearly less likeable and less desirable than the protagonist.
4) The protagonist must be able to be related to by the audience.

Application of the Formula:
These are very difficult problems to overcome when the main character is a man who can feel no emotion and is a murderer by trade. The first is quite simple to overcome: simply have Dexter be the protagonist. This creates the problems of the second and third. In order to make a serial killer likeable, they go to absurd lengths to develop his character (not in the literary sense of the word but in the moral sense), making him a murderer of murderers. They also make him into the victim, taking away the possible blame, since it was his father's act of slaughtering his mother among others in front of his very eyes in a highly traumatic moment in his youth that makes him into the person that he is. This shifts the blame so that the audience pities him and he is justified in his sociopathic tendencies and his intrinsic need to murder. He also goes to inexorable lengths to prove, at least to himself, that the villain of each episode (another serial killer) is, in fact, an evil person and murderer and unable to be successfully be convicted and prosecuted by law. On more than one occasion, he even waits until after the legal proceedings fail. He also typically must prove "to himself" that the murderer he kills murders innocent people that are good and has no intention of changing. Thus, having taken care of the first three problems, the only difficulty left is the final challenge: making the protagonist, a sociopathic serial killer, relatable. Clearly, the station wants to relate to a much larger audience than the people who kill and have no emotion, so they have to take care of this by inserting feelings into the character in a way in which the audience will fail to realize them as feelings but rather as universals expressed in themselves. To this end, they utilize long expository monologues wherein Dexter tells the audience about his feelings of not belonging and awkwardness and how he longs to fit in but just cannot do it no matter how hard he tries and how even though he can smile when he is supposed to or perform the other necessary actions not to be marked be others, he feels alone and outcast because normal people have those things come naturally to them but for him it is nothing more than a formulaic regurgitation of necessary motions that he has learned. These minor emotions are able to be generalized enough to fit almost anyone (anyone except, perhaps, a sociopath), solving all of the problems, and now we have a TV show…