Why Won’t Dexter Die?

If critical consensus was enough to kill a TV show, the Showtime series Dexter would have died in 2011. That’s based on the reviews for the show’s sixth season, which saw the tide turn for the serial killer drama that refuses to die, even as its titular protagonist (played by Michael C. Hall) began to warp away from his innate anti-hero nature. “With stellar ratings, and a renewal for two more seasons, Dexter has me worried,” Emily Nussbaum wrote then in The New Yorker. “The better Dexter gets the worse Dexter may become.”

Nussbaum’s words ended up being prophetic, as by the time Dexter ended (for the first time) in 2013, critics were screaming for relief. “The whole mess of the series’ final four seasons,” Emily St. James wrote for The AV Club, was that the show refused “to view the character as anything other than a much-needed dark avenger. The show cannot have its title character portrayed in anything other than shades of brilliant white. What was once a horror program became farce.”

It didn’t help that when Dexter did finally end, the original series finale made a few wild choices, beginning with killing Dexter’s sister Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) with a blood clot, followed by Dexter sailing his boat into a storm, only to survive and turn up in Oregon, working as a lumberjack. “And then he becomes a lumberjack” immediately entered the TV critic lexicon as an example of a terrible way to end a TV show, along with “They were dead the whole time” and “Bran takes the Iron Throne.”

However, some intellectual property simply won’t die — especially when the series finale sets ratings records for the network. Took maybe a few years longer than one might have guessed, but in 2021 Dexter: New Blood brought Hall back to Showtime for a new season, which Consequence’s Clint Worthington called out for the brand play it was, writing “At no point does Dexter: New Blood feel like anything but the latest example of networks reviving their old IPs for one last round at bat.”

New Blood became a huge ratings success for the network, while theoretically offering a much more concrete ending for its titular character — Dexter was left bleeding out in the woods, having been shot by his long-lost son Harrison (Jack Alcott). Despite the ratings, though, a second season of New Blood never happened, with Showtime instead prioritizing a Dexter prequel series — Original Sin eventually premiered in December 2024, featuring Patrick Gibson as a young Dexter just starting his new double vocation as crime scene analyst/serial killer killer.

By the time Original Sin premiered, though, Showtime had already announced that Hall would be returning as O.G. Dexter in another new series. Original Sin, in fact, began with Dexter’s miraculous medical rescue (after which Hall’s presence on that show was limited to voice-over narration) — the rescue that sets the stage for the all-too-aptly-titled third spinoff in four years, Dexter: Resurrection.

Despite all this lingering exhaustion over Dexter’s many lives, Resurrection actually proves to be pretty entertaining, adding enough new life to the franchise to justify that particular subtitle. Is it really just New Blood Season 2? Well, only a few characters have crossed over, and contract-wise the deals probably look different, but in a spiritual sense — yeah, it is. The spinoff arrives this week, and things pick up where New Blood (and the Original Sin prologue) left off: Dexter recovering from his gunshot wound, while Harrison flees to find a fresh start.

When it comes to all three of these spinoffs, the use of new locations has kept each of them from feeling too much like a retread of what came before, at least on a superficial level: The original Miami location was a key part of Dexter’s core aesthetic, with those bright pops of color and sunshine, even as questions might be asked about how many serial killers even a city like Miami can conceal. New Blood, by contrast, took place in snowy upstate New York, while Original Sin stayed in Miami but switched things up with its ’90s period trappings.

And Resurrection brings us to the Big Apple, a big enough playground for Harrison to hide in plain sight and for a largely recovered Dexter to track him down. Dexter’s only gone to New York City to find Harrison, officially, but he quickly gets drawn back into the business of dispatching those who deserve dispatching. Embargo restrictions mean this review can’t say much about the specifics of Dexter’s new life in the city, but based on the first four episodes provided to critics, what’s perhaps most promising about Resurrection is that it might finally address those earlier critical concerns about Dexter’s non-heroic nature.

Take the fact that Resurrection finds Dexter determined to target a particular serial killer because the killer goes by the moniker of “The Dark Passenger” — and that’s Dexter’s name, gosh darn it. (Well, one of his names, anyway. At one point he also refers to himself as The Bay Harbor Butcher, triggering a real wave of nostalgia.) The “Dark Passenger” thing is a petty point of pride for him, and a powerful indicator that as much as Dexter might try to be on the side of the angels, the killer within him has never retired — especially as he gets drawn into a whole new community of murderers.

Perhaps enabling this somewhat darker Dexter is that the show becomes a two-hander, with Harrison’s storyline given almost equal narrative weight. While Harrison might be his father’s son, he’s still young enough that his path in life is not fully locked — there’s still hope for him when it comes to fighting his worst urges, a hope that Dexter himself abandoned long ago. If the writers of Dexter are still searching for “shades of brilliant white” in their characters, Harrison makes for a far more sympathetic option.

Additionally, Resurrection brings back Angel Batista (David Zayas) from the original series, who retires from Miami Metro before heading north to tie up the one big loose end of his career — his suspicion that Dexter is the killer who’s evaded capture all these years. There have been plenty of threats over the years that Dexter might, at last, face some consequences for his actions. But maybe this time, it’ll happen for sure?

It feels very Charlie Brown-with-the-football to write that, especially considering how many other times it’s seemed like Dexter would actually come to an end. But if Resurrection must exist, at least it does so with a truly impressive cast of stars, including Uma Thurman, Peter Dinklage, Krysten Ritter, Neil Patrick Harris, Eric Stonestreet, and David Dastmalchian. Most of them don’t appear until Episode 4, but it’s worth the wait.

Will Resurrection be the show that finally brings Dexter to a close? It feels unlikely. The best one might hope for is that they’d greenlight a second season of Resurrection, rather than create another spinoff with a slightly vague subtitle for us to remember. Dexter: Cruise Control. Dexter: The Quickening. Dexter: Electric Boogaloo. It really doesn’t matter, in the end. Whatever you call it, Dexter will be Dexter. All we can do is hope that the improvements offered by Resurrection stick.

The first two episodes of Dexter: Resurrection premiere Friday, July 11th on Paramount+ with Showtime. Check out the trailer below.