Fall TV Blog

L.A. Law fans, get your TiVos ready: Jimmy Smits is returning to the courthouse.

Smits has just joined the third season of Showtime’s bloody good drama Dexter as Miguel Prado, a flashy and driven assistant district attorney from a powerful Miami family, Showtime announced Thursday. The Emmy and Golden Globe winner will appear on 10 of the season’s 12 episodes.

As a Miami ADA, Prado will team up with Dexter — a forensics expert (played by Michael C. Hall, who’s currently dating Dexter costar Jennifer Carpenter) who secretly spends his free time executing serial killers — to take down a brutal murderer stalking the citizens of Miami.

Smits, one of PEOPLE’s sexiest men in 2004, most recently starred in last year’s cancelled CBS drama, Cane.

Dexter begins filming next week, and will return to Showtime in the fall.

Clark Samuels/Startraks; Chris Weeks/AP

• It was easier than you might think to make Showtime’s grisly series Dexter — about a serial killer (Michael C. Hall) who kills other serial killers — suitable for network TV. After all, could anything be more brutal than My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad?

• Jericho is back after fans sent almost 20 tons of peanuts (a nod to a main character) to CBS. Sick of dry roaste, network execs have since asked that this time, fans send honey-roasted nuts.

• Even more American versions of British shows are set to hit our TV screens. Said one U.S. exec, “Very rarely has something been gangbusters over there that hasn’t really worked over here.” Said the cast of Coupling, “Oh really?”

Photo: Paul Drinkwater/NBC; Jill Greenberg/Showtime

Without writers to develop the crime dramas audiences are dying to watch, CBS has a plan to air a watered-down first season of Dexter, Showtime’s killer dramedy about a cop who’s a forensics specialist in blood splatters, but also moonlights as a vigilante serial killer. The show, which stars Golden Globe nominee Michael C. Hall, may be have earned rave reviews from critics, but is now getting criticized by parents.

TV watchdog group Parents Television Council issued the following statement:

“We are formally asking CBS to cancel its plan to air the first season of Dexter,” PTC President Tim Winter said. “This show is not suitable for airing on broadcast television… the series compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn’t get discovered. Dexter introduces audiences to the depths of depravity and indifference as it chronicles the main character’s troubled quest for vigilante justice by celebrating graphic, premeditated murder.”

Meanwhile, some television reviewers sing a different tune. The Chicago Sun-Times called the show “fantastic, fascinating, creepy, charming and gruesome,” while the San Francisco Chronicle called it “daring and original.”

As for the edited version that will appear on CBS, a rep from the network said in a statement that the episodes “will be edited to meet all network television broadcast standards, similar to the way theatrical movies have been edited for broadcast for many years.”

Tell us: Do you think Dexter should air on CBS? Or should it stay on Showtime?

Photo: Paul Drinkwater/NBC; Jill Greenberg/Showtime