Great news for those of you who, like me, are morbidly curious about Showtime's new serial killer series, Dexter. This coming weekend, Showtime is free for most cable subscribers. It's an annual thing that the network does to promote its new and most popular programs, but this time the free weekend is also expanding online. Yahoo! TV will have free previews of Dexter, Sleeper Cell, Weeds and The L Word. There will also be a teaser for The Tudors, an upcoming show from Showtime that is currently filming in Ireland.

The free weekend of Showtime starts Friday and ends Sunday, while the free online previews will be available beginning Friday through October 13th.

Get it? Sleeper Cell "wakes up?" That's a pun... fine, make fun of me later.

Showtime has ordered up a second season of it's acclaimed mini-series Sleeper Cell. Here's a question though. Why did they call it a mini-series? Wasn't it ten episodes long? Shouldn't that make it just a season? Last I checked, ten episodes wasn't very "mini." Anywho, the second go around will have eight episodes, and according to the press release both stars Michael Ealy and Oded Fehr will be back. Last year's two-hour finale will set the stage for the coming events. Production is set to start later this summer.

Every Tuesday here on TV Squad , we will highlight the week's TV-on-DVD releases. Some noteworthy releases today, March 14, 2006:

• All Dogs Go to Heaven: The Series - Dogs Undercover; Friends to the Rescue
• Babylon 5 - The Legend Of The Rangers
• Columbo - The Complete 4th Season
• I Dream of Jeannie - The Complete 1st Season: Colorized Edition; The Complete 1st Season: Original Black & White Edition
• MacGyver - Season 5
• Multiple Shows - Jimmy Timmy Power Hour 2
• Murder, She Wrote - The Complete 3rd Season
• Naked City - Set 3
• A Perfect Spy (mini-series) - John Le Carre's: A Perfect Spy
• She Spies: Bad Girls Gone Good - Season 1
• The Simple Life 3: Interns - Complete Season
• Sleeper Cell - The Complete 1st Season
• Speed Racer - Collector's Edition Vol 4
• V.I.P. - The Complete 1st season

Showtime and Apple announced today that the critically acclaimed shows Weeds and Sleeper Cell will now be available for purchase on iTunes. Showtime becomes the first premium cable network to join the family of downloadable programs from the online service. It seems odd that a subscription cable network would go ahead with this, but you never know. This could help to drum up a lot of buzz for the second season of Weeds, but the first was so good that I think there may already be enough.

I missed out on Sleeper Cell but based on the reviews written by TV Squad's own Keith and Ryan, it sounds fantastic.

Kirstie Alley's Fat Actress was also added but this isn't too big a deal since a few episodes were available to watch on Yahoo! a few months ago. I would imagine if Showtime likes the results we'll see The L Word, Barber Shop, and Huff being added to iTunes as well.

"Jihad is cost-effective, not free." Farik mentions this fact more than once on this episode, and it's both horrifying and poignant. There are a lot of sympathizers to the extremist Muslim cause, but not everyone will work for free. The terrorist cell that Farik is in charge of has to make money some way; they've chosen drug trafficking. As Darwyn points out, why not use the infidels' own vices against them. In this episode they do, and it's probably a terrifying reality. On with the show!

Showtime is taking an interesting approach with Sleeper Cell; it premiered at the beginning of last week, and its two hour finale is this Sunday. I'm sure it will be available for a while on the various InDemand services, so if you haven't been keeping up with its hectic schedule, do yourself a favor and catch up. It kind of snuck up on us here at TV Squad, so Keith and I are going to be tag-teaming the reviews to get you up to date. I'm hooked on this show, and while I've never watched The Wire on HBO, I bet it had a similar feel: always on edge and very high tension. Any show that keeps me on the edge of my seat every episode, is definitely worth my time. On with the show!

There've been quite a few requests for us to cover this show, and honestly, it hadn't really been on my radar until its recent nomination for an AFI award earlier this week. So I set my Tivo to go wild and record whatever it could, and sure enough, I have a nice cache of episodes, ready to becaught up on.

First up, of course, was the pilot episode. So, is this show worth the hype? Hell yes.