Showtime Aims to Give Dexter a ‘Proper Finale’ With 10 New Episodes

When Dexter: New Blood premieres on Showtime in November, don’t expect it to be just another season of the beloved serial killer mystery series, which ran for eight seasons from 2006 to 2013. Instead, the original series’ showrunners and writers say they want viewers to come in to the 10-episode special event series expecting a new story and new themes set nearly a decade after the events of the initial series finale. There's even hope that maybe the series will attract brand-new fans. “This is not the ninth season of Dexter,” showrunner Clyde Phillips, who worked on the original series, told reporters at the Television Critics Associations’ annual summer press tour, held virtually this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. "This is a whole new embodiment of the show, a whole new imagining of the show ... almost a decade has passed since the Season 8 finale, and we want to acknowledge that.” The end of Dexter’s eight-season run left Dexter Morgan, played by Michael C. Hall, living in Oregon after faking his own death and leaving behind his son, a somewhat open-ended fate that left many long-time fans of the show disappointed. Even Showtime’s top executives admitted they didn’t stick the landing for one of their most beloved series. With the special, they are looking to deliver a final send-off that will set things right for viewers. AMC Networks Says Niche Focus Makes It ‘the Worldwide Leader in Targeted Streaming’ “Dexter is a jewel in the crown of Showtime, and we didn’t do it justice in the end, I think,” Gary Levine, Showtime Networks’ president of entertainment, told reporters Tuesday. “That has always been a burr under my saddle. We’ve always wanted to see if there was a way to do it right and it took a long time to figure out what that was.” The special event series, which is slated to premiere on Showtime beginning on Nov. 7, aims to be “a proper finale for a brilliant series,” Levine added. Dexter: New Blood will offer up plenty of fodder for longtime fans to latch on to. In addition to the returning showrunners, writers and directors, the new series will bring back some of the original cast, including Hall, who is reprising his role as the titular character, and Jennifer Carpenter, who is reprising her role as Debra Morgan. There are other returning characters that haven’t yet been announced, the showrunners and writers teased. The series will pick up on loose threads left over from Dexter’s initial run–including, crucially, Dexter’s son Harrison Morgan, now at an age where he seeks out his father to reconnect with him. But much of what occurred over the nearly one decade since the show wrapped will be left unsaid, and will rely on the viewers’ imaginations, Hall said. “We don’t spend a great deal of time in anything like a flashback or anything like that as far as where Dexter has been,” said Hall. “We are led to believe that he’s been somewhat nomadic, but we are meeting him in this town of Iron Lake, a place where he has found that he is able to start to cobble out, he is doing more than just existing. He is cobbling together a semblance of a normal life and trying to live one up to this point.” The setting will also be starkly different than the original series, which took place in Miami. Instead, it is set in the fictional town of Iron Lake, N.Y., a cold-weather location chosen as an aesthetic one as much as anything, admitted director Marcos Siega. “One of the big reasons why we wanted to do this Iron Lake small-town life was just how beautiful blood on snow is,” he said. “That sort of red against the white, it excited us, and so that’s one of the big reasons why we went to the small-town sort of thing.” Phillips and Hall have repeatedly discussed the opportunity of reviving Dexter in some form or fashion, Phillips said Tuesday, and Hall admitted that a revival had “been percolating.” But the timing, Phillips said, was never right until now. “I think enough time had passed that there were certain storytelling opportunities that hadn’t really been in play earlier on,” Hall said. "That was part of it. And it also had to do with the fact that we were kind of getting the band back together.”