Dexter Morgan kills people. Don Draper stole a dead war hero’s identity and has more mistresses than you can shake a golf club at. Yet, somehow these men – the heroes of Showtime’s Dexter and AMC’s Mad Men – are two of the most compelling and likable male characters on television.

Both shows are about men with secrets. Draper keeps a drawer full of photographs and documents from his former life tucked away at home. Turns out his marriage, as well as his icy-cool competence, hinge on it remaining under lock and key. Meanwhile, Draper’s colleagues at the fictional 1960s ad shop Sterling Cooper have secrets of their own—homosexuality, extramarital affairs, babies born out of wedlock.

The show doesn’t gloss over the consequences of living in a radically repressed era. But it does cast a vaguely nostalgic light on a more tight-lipped time, when even presidential dalliances (JFK) and disabilities (FDR, a few decades earlier) were treated with discretion. Everyone loves Draper because, as one character put it, “he’s beautiful and he doesn’t talk too much.” In Med Men, secrets are generally safe.

Like Draper, emotionally stunted and monosyllabic Dexter is the most popular guy in the room. He’s a great listener, after all. And as with Draper, we can’t help but sympathize with Miami’s most scrupulous serial killer. We wish that Rita, Dexter’s increasingly desperate housewife, would stop nagging him about his Clark Kent-like absences. We hope that Dexter’s keener cop sister Deb could find it in her heart to accept her chainsaw-wielding brother for who he is. Why, we wonder, can’t Dexter have his cake and kill people too?

I’m not sure if it’s a male thing, but my intuition (that’s supposed to be a female trait, right?) says it is. The other night I was out for dinner with a colleague who pointed out a row of middle-aged men seated at the bar. They seemed to be stalling. Whether they were putting off work or going home to their partners, I don’t know. But they didn’t seem repressed or uncommunicative, just gracefully in limbo, content in their solitude.

One of the unintended consequences of dismantling the old boys clubs of Draper’s time is that grown boys now find themselves clubless. As kids we could retreat into fictional worlds, snow forts or Star Wars fantasies. Now men aren’t supposed to read fiction. We’ve been banished to the realm of realism, to MBA programs and engineering faculties. In a happily co-ed world, the only male spaces left (billiard halls, strip clubs, locker rooms, etc.) are filled with danger or homophobia or macho fronting. All Dexter and Draper want is a room of their own—though a drawer or kill shed will do. Is that so much to ask?

****

Dan Levy is a writer, editor and former youth educator in Montreal. He blogs sporadically at http://danjlevy.wordpress.com/