How's that for irony?

In which I actually talk about something besides my stupid personal life for a change.

A couple weeks ago, I watched Heroes with mlyn, and griped a lot about how poorly they use dramatic irony on the show, particularly with regard to Mohinder, who is quite possibly one of the prettiest men on the planet but who is also, as they're writing it right now, the dumbest.

Dramatic irony is one of those things that, when used well, can engage an audience of readers, playgoers, movie-watchers, book-readers, etc. The problem is, it's often not done well, and it's especially poorly employed on weekly TV series, where it can frustrate the hell out of audiences when they're forced week after week to see things the other characters aren't getting.

I see a lot of misuse of the term in my job, where writers often think it means just really intense irony, but it does have a specific definition. Dramatic irony:

occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate, as in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet.

This is really just a fancy way of saying the audience knows what's going on, but the characters onstage (film, page, whatever) don't.

( Cut for Heroes spoilers up through recent eps, and Dexter S1 )