It’s Halloween. All the monsters are walking the streets. And one of television’s greatest monsters – at least according to his own definition – is about to return to the halls of television.
We are a week away from the return of Dexter, the somehow lovable serial killer indelibly portrayed by Michael C. Hall from 2006 to 2013. Next Sunday New Blood premieres on Showtime, supposedly to wrap up the story in a much more satisfactory manner than the viewers got in the final episode eight years ago.
‘Supposedly’ because I don’t believe for a moment that if the limited series is a critical or ratings hit for Showtime, the network will allow it to be the last word. And also because I’m not a hundred percent convinced that the man they have brought back to do the job can resolve it. But backstory is everything, so let’s start at the beginning.
Dexter was one of the most brilliant series in the history of television the first four years it was on the air – that’s the one thing fans and critics universally agree. And as great as the cast was, much of the credit must go to the head writer Clyde Philips who did run the series like a Swiss watch for four seasons. Then at the end of Season 4, citing exhaustion Philips departed the series and according to the fan base and critics, the series collapsed.
I actually hold a minority opinion on this. I hold the fifth season – which featured superb performances from Johnny Lee Miller and Julia Stiles – was the show’s last great one. I consider Season 7, which was messy in a lot of ways, extremely well crafted and featuring two of the best characters in the series’ cannon, Isaac Serko (Ray Stevenson) a Russian mobster whose killing face is as much a front as Dexter’s and Hannah (Yvonne Strahovski) Dexter’s true soul mate. I was even willing to defend Season 6 up to a point. But I am willing to concede there were major problems with the series going forward after Season 4 – which is why I question the wisdom of bringing Philips back, because he’s the one who basically caused it.
Refresher course: For the first half of the series, Dexter was involved with Rita (Julie Benz in one of her best performances) a domestic assault victim with two children. Initially a false front, Dexter found himself almost against his will falling in love. During Season 3 Rita became pregnant and Dexter married her. Much of what made Season 4 the series finest hour wasn’t just the fact the show had its best serial killer Trinity, AKA Arthur Mitchell (John Lithgow in an Emmy winning performance) it was watching Dexter trying to balance being a husband and father with being a serial killer. That is the reason he follow Mitchell so closely hoping to learn from him… and that led to the series and one of television’s finest hours.
Dexter returns home having dispatched Trinity and has a vision of future with Rita and the kids, Then he walks into the bathroom and finds Rita in the bathtub with her throat cut and his baby son Harry in a pool of his mother’s blood, just like his father had found him when he was born.
I’m not going to deny this was a masterstroke – I put it on my first list of TV’s 50 greatest episodes in 2010 and again eight years later. But in retrospect, you can see the series’ action start to fall from this very moment. Two episodes into Season 5, Astor and Cody Rita’s children depart from the scene to live with their grandparents and are almost never seen again for the remainder of the series’ run. And Harry, for everything he represents to Dexter, is regulated to little more than a prop for the rest of the show. The remainder of the series' run consisted far more of coming up with more intriguing killers for Dexter to chase rather than have him try to put up his front. Now you can blame this on the staff for not being able to continue where Philips left off, but I’d argue that this is as much Philips’ responsibility as it is everybody else. He made the mess that the writers spent the next four years trying to clean up. Do you really trust him to fix it?
And the thing that bothers me more is how New Blood is being depicted. It’s more than a decade after the end of Season 8 where Dexter faked his death and has been living in the woods. He’s still living there in the start of the series and apparently hasn’t killed anybody since the series finale. Now a new killer has started and it looks like Dexter is going to unsheathe his knives again.
Problem 1: Aside from Hall, there’s only one holdover from the series that’s going to be appearing. (I’ll get to that in a minute because that’s another problem.) The thing is, as much as the world would like you to believe that Hall was the only reason fans tuned in week after week, it wasn’t at least for me. I liked watching Dexter stalk killers sure, but I also liked watching the work of David Zayas as the complicated Angel Batista, the brilliantly foul-mouthed Vince Masuka, as impressive with his bloodwork as he was with his vocabulary and the brilliant foul-mouthed work of Jennifer Carpenter as Deb, Dexter’s adopted sister. The writers apparently want us to believe that it’s enough to see (and of course hear) Hall as he goes through life. I’m not sure that would be enough.
Problem 2: Deb is back…as a ghost. Now we all know Dexter spent the last six seasons of the series listening to the voice of Harry, his adopted cop father who gave him the ‘code’ he famously followed. So I get Dexter, just as Hall’s David Fisher did on Six Feet Under, sees dead people. The problem is they seem to be using Deb as his conscience. I don’t buy that. I understand that Deb’s character was fundamentally destroyed by her involvement with her brother – and the viewers (but apparently not the writers) were outraged that the series ended with her dying. This version of her, however, doesn’t seem real.
If Dexter were to be haunted by his past, there are plenty of innocent people who died because of him. There’s Rita, of course and Doakes, the foul-mouthed sergeant who died a villain because he made the mistake of figuring out who Dexter really was. And of course, there’s LaGuerta (Lauren Velez) who found out the truth as well and ended up a victim of both Morgans as a result. So why bring back Deb as his conscience? It honestly seems more like an apology to the fans for killing Deb off.
Which bring me to the third and final problem: New Blood is supposed to be a way to bring closure to everything that went wrong in the final season of Dexter. But the thing is…we know how television works. If the writers were to end this limited series with Dexter ending up in jail or dead, then yes the series would come to an end. But in my heart of hearts, I just don’t think that’ll happen. It is the nature of television – especially in the age of the reboot and continuation of series – to always leave the door open for another season. We saw it with 24, we saw it with The X-Files, and I honestly think given the way Twin Peaks: The Return ended, Showtime would welcome a second season. (A lot of the cast died in the interim, but when that’s stopped Hollywood?) Hell, for all we know the series might involve Dexter teaching his ‘code’ to someone new – maybe even Harry, who the trailers have already revealed will make an appearance in the limited series – and find a way to continue the show that way. Would there be any logic to continuing a series without the central character? No, but that’s didn’t stop 24: Legacy.
I still haven’t decided if I’m going to watch New Blood. I’ve got a lot on my plate TV wise and there are still a lot of more interesting series going on that I want to either catch up on or actually see. (Showtime’s Yellow Jackets premiering the week after New Blood is one such show.) And I’ve been down this road far too many times with basically diminishing returns. I’ve missed Dexter, I’ll admit – rewatching the first two seasons during quarantine made me realize just how much. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I just want to see Dexter on his own. As Showtime – in its tradition – reruns much of the old show in marathons, I’ll take a look and see if I that tickles my fancy with a bone-saw. But honestly, I’m not sure blood in the snow and Michael C. Hall is enough to make me be caught in the woods with him again.
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