The first thing you notice about Dexter: New Blood, is the way it bears absolutely no resemblance, tonally, structurally, even atmospherically, to the original series it’s based on. The Showtime Dexter, which aired from 2006 to 2013, was set in vibrant, sun-soaked Miami and took us into the mind of a serial killer who was often humorous, wry and even happy-go-lucky, a mood that was buoyed by a bevy of comic-relief supporting characters and murders that were often played for dark laughs. The new ten-episode limited series, which begins airing on Showtime Sunday Nov 7, is by contrast cold, trading Florida for a fictional hamlet in upstate New York and pastel moods for a protagonist who’s lost his playful spark amid a cast of world-weary small-town characters.
With Dexter: New Blood, the streaming era’s eternal pursuit of More Content has reached a peculiar but inevitable point at which even intellectual property without a passionate fan base rooting for it is being revived. Instead of a reboot to squeeze more blood from a popular stone, the pitch is reboot-as-mulligan, a bid to lure audiences back by offering an opportunity to fix what went wrong. Over the course of eight seasons, Dexter went from popular, albeit somewhat kooky, prestige drama status to delivering perhaps the most bemusing, widely derided and mocked series finale in recent television history (until Game of Thrones unseated it).
The show peaked in its fourth season, which pit Michael C. Hall’s forensic-specialist-who-only-kills-other-killers against John Lithgow’s disturbing, Emmy-winning villain. The back half of the series involved a revolving door of writers and producers after showrunner Clyde Phillips’ departure, with story arcs that either missed the mark or trod water. It wasn’t all bad—the seventh season, in which Dexter’s police detective sister (Jennifer Carpenter) finally understood her adoptive brother’s true nature, was a return to form that came too late, before Dexter’s entirely unearned escape at the end of season eight.
Now eight years later, both Hall and Carpenter are back, although the latter now appears to Dexter as a ghost-sidekick, much as their dead father did the first time around. Dexter now lives a quiet life in a quiet town, dates the local police chief, and has been white-knuckling his homicidal urges since the finale. It isn’t a spoiler to say he eventually falls off the wagon, right as his son Harrison, now a surly emo teenager, tracks him down. Across the four episodes screened for critics, this new collection is jarring in its commitment to trying something new, as Dexter works desperately to cover up his “relapse” while staying one-step ahead of the mounting town intrigue he inadvertently stirs and obsessing over the idea that his son may have inherited his disease—yes, there seems to be another killer in the neighborhood.
As before, Hall’s mix of antihero charm and unnerving monstrousness anchors the whole thing, although there’s an intriguing new wrinkle: Dexter’s need to kill is played much more as an addiction than it ever was in the series. He’s contemplative and serious, carrying the full weight of eight seasons worth of sins and collateral damage. There’s no playful wit to the voiceover narration this time; whereas the ghost of Dexter’s father served as a sage mentor, the image he now projects of his sister often berates, questions and even attacks him.
There’s no telling where New Blood will leave Dexter Morgan, but Hall and his original producers have certainly rolled the dice in an effort to deliver something worthy of revisiting rather than a glorified “ninth” season. GQ talked to Hall about why he came back, his new approach to the character, and what he really thinks about Dexter’s series finale.
Given the very vocal dissatisfaction with the Dexter finale, was there a part of you that didn’t want to come back at all and engage with the high expectations of the fandom?
For sure. I mean, a part of both the hesitation and the appetite surrounding going back was orbiting the fact that audiences loved the show but were very dissatisfied with the way it ended. I didn’t want to return just because we could, I wanted to return because we discovered a story that felt like it was worth telling. Something like this that is dependent on so many moving parts, you never know exactly how it’s all going to go, but ultimately I had enough faith to take the leap. And that had to do with the scripts that were all written, the story we decided to tell, this new context we found for the show, and it had to do with the fact that Clyde Phillips was sitting at the head of the writer’s table. He was responsible for walking the fine tonal line that the show managed to walk back in the day. And Marcos Siega, the directing producer, was also there taking responsibility for the look of the show. So there was this sense of getting the band back together.
I didn’t know for sure that it was something that I would do. But it was always something in the back of my mind like Man, I sure do hope that something emerges. I wanted to give the fans, myself and the character a more satisfying and definitive visit.
Did it feel like unfinished business, in a way?
I suppose. I don’t think that’s a way that I would have necessarily characterized it, before I knew for sure that we were going to get down to that business. But yeah, once we were on set, and it was happening it was like, yeah this feels good, it feels right.
I want to talk about the tone of this series. It’s interesting— especially considering, as you said, it is the original band back together— because the original series had a kind of satirical bent and a levity to it. It’s sun-soaked. So it was jarring to come into New Blood and see that you guys made this choice to have it be the total opposite in every way, from the attitude to the atmosphere.
When I said getting the band back together, I think it was because I knew that the show would be so different and so newly contextualized. And the character is psychologically in such a different—he’s a different person in a lot of ways. In a way, having those people in place would allow us to maintain some connective tissue to that world that is foreign to this one, so that we weren’t completely cut off from it. Something that provided an intuitive feeling that we believed that this was that guy from that world that is so unfamiliar.
The tone of the first one was much more wry and Dexter wasn’t implicated by his behavior at that point. He had this perfect, monstrous, firing-on-all-cylinders authentic killer self that he indulged and he was able to do so because of this totally simulated inauthentic-but-authentic-seeming person he presented to the world. Whereas [over the course of the series] he started to indulge in this idea of having authentic humanity and that created all this overlap and chaos, to the point where he had to bury the killer entirely and is now making an earnest, baby-steps attempt at having an authentic life. But he’s doing so having literally faked his own death and pretending to be someone he’s not by name, even.
So tonally it’s a lot more—the Dexter we meet at the beginning is very ordered in his way, and the Dexter we meet now is very much on the edge of, and soon after we start, in the midst of chaos.
My favorite thing about New Blood so far is the way that you tweaked your approach to the character. Especially the first episode, when Dexter falls back into his old ways, it felt as if you were modeling the performance on addiction in a way, like a relapse.
Yea I definitely think of it that way. It in essence is that. He’s a guy who, to use the addiction language, he’s a guy who’s powerless over his addiction, his Dark Passenger. His life has become unmanageable. There’s all this collateral damage that he can’t pretend isn’t there. His wife died, his sister died, he’s forsaken his son for fear that he’ll be destroyed. He’s come to terms with the wreckage of his indulgence.
If you’re someone who’s given over to the idea that you have an addictive relationship to something and you stop doing that thing for almost ten years and then you do it again? It’s not gonna feel the way it felt when you did it before. When he says he’s “rusty,” he’s rusty logistically, in terms of having everything he needs to kill someone properly and cleanly, but he’s also rusty internally. His relationship to himself as a killer has changed in fundamental ways, and I think over the course of the season we’ll discover a Dexter whose relationship to himself as a killer is not as neat and ordered [as it was before]. It’s actually much more chaotic and personal in a way that it never was.
I’m sure you got a lot of groan-worthy questions back in the day about how much you are or aren’t really like the character. But watching this now, it does strike me that there may be some similarities. You turned 50 earlier this year, and we’re revisiting a Dexter who himself is grappling with age and parenthood in a way he hadn’t before.
I think ideally, nothing’s off limits in terms of what you intuitively or even unconsciously bring to your work. So whatever life I’ve lived since the show ended is all grist for the mill. I’m that much older, so the proposition of climbing in and out of windows is that much dicier. And yeah I guess the time of doing Dexter was in its own sort of bubble. That ended and that bubble was popped and I got on with my life. When I returned to the character in this new context, that bubble wasn’t there anymore. He’s not able to access that untouchable, rarefied state of being that Dexter once was, and he’s gotta operate in a world that’s a bit more earthbound.
Since Dexter ended, true crime and serial killers have seen a real boom in pop culture. New Blood, very consciously it would seem, doesn’t really lean into serial killer tropes, at least in an obvious way.
If Dexter broke any ground originally, we weren’t looking to determine what the new ground to break might be and push the envelope even further. I never really felt like the show was that indulgent when it came to the depiction of violence, it was obviously dark and didn’t shy away from the reality of what this guy was up to, but I think I think it was the blanks you filled in in your imagination that were the most horrifying. We didn’t really talk specifically or explicitly either way when it came to that aspect of things, I think we just wanted to do our best to guard our sense of the truth of the character in this new situation he was in and whether or not it was pushing boundaries was not something we were really thinking about. I think that would have been a fool’s errand to try to chase that.
A major change is that Deb now fulfills the ghost role, but in a manner that is not a retread of the way Dexter interacted with Harry. There’s a point in one of the episodes where she actually manhandles you. It’s interesting that he’s now envisioning a much more antagonistic companion.
That’s absolutely right, I’m glad you picked up on that. She’s there on the show because of a phenomenon we established where Dexter talks to dead people, but she’s no Harry. The little glimpse we get of their relationship at the top of the episode gives a sense of how it has been: placid, serene, soothing. One of the fruits of his abstinence is he gets to have this imagined relationship with his dead sister that he wasn’t able to have even when she was alive. But he commits the two fundamental crimes, opening the door to his former life—in the form of his son no less—and killing again. And all bets are off. She’s all of a sudden representative of an internal conversation he’s having, and he’s someone who’s very much at odds with himself. She’s gonna be soothing at one moment, mocking the next, and beating the shit out of him the next. It’s a very unpredictable and dangerous space for him.
Did you feel like, it’s not Dexter without, say, him talking to a dead person?One thing that’s maybe both similar in form but ultimately quite different is I think Dexter is trying to catch up to a definition of himself. When he says [in the premiere],
“I may still be a monster, but i’m an evolving monster,” and he decides not to keep the blood slide and not give himself that indulgence, he’s not making a proclamation about what he knows to be true about himself. He’s trying to craft this new concept of who he is. He’s aspiring to live up to this idea that seems appropriate. He doesn’t know who he is.
I mean we talked about the voiceover element, how that was going to function. I do think there’s a lot of stuff that maybe would have been executed in voiceover that’s instead executed between Dexter and Deb. Dexter doesn’t talk to us until the Dark Passenger emerges, and that felt right. Especially given that when the show ended, Dexter didn’t say anything. And that drove people nuts, and I totally get it. But I do feel that it’s justifiable in hindsight in the sense that he’s like, I’m not killing anymore, I don’t deserve that. I’m putting myself in exile. And he couldn’t tell us that. I do feel like it’s satisfying that we hold off and only hear from him when he starts killing again. His relationship with the audience is completely tied to his identity as a killer, not as a guy who works at a sporting goods store.
He just can’t afford to justifiably be too cute about stuff anymore. All his self-referential, arch, comic-booky concept of himself is just gone. He has little shards of that but it’s pretty much destroyed. As far as having conversations about what we did and didn’t want to do, it was really more about, does this feel right? Does it feel honest, or does it feel like we’re reaching too far back into what this once was.
The way you just described the show’s final scene was a way I hadn’t thought about it before. It’s been eight years of people reacting and referring to the finale with very mixed, often negative reactions. What has your own reaction to it been like over time? Was there a point where you felt it was misunderstood and a point where you understood the frustration?
It’s like a joke: if you have to explain it, it’s not funny. My explanation of why the show ended that way makes sense, but when you watch a show you’re not reading an essay, you don’t have footnotes. You just know how it feels and it didn’t feel good to people. It didn’t feel right. And no matter how much I can intellectually or motivationally justify how it happened, I think how it was executed was obviously not something that was satisfying for people. I mean when that aired I was in Bangladesh participating in this documentary, I was invited to do that independent of anything else, but at the same time it doesn’t feel like a mistake that I managed to be on the other side of the world when the finale aired. I think I had some sort of inkling that it was not going to blow people’s socks off.
Did it feel right to you when you guys were making it?
I was inside it, I’d been inside it all along. I’ve been inside the character and had been gratified to discover that we had successfully captured and conveyed something that felt at least somewhat in sync with my experience of doing it. I think part of what was hard about watching the end is the sense I’d made of it, the understanding I had about why it was justifiable or resonant or could work didn’t make it to the screen for most people. That was a part of my own dissatisfaction and in the end, a big part of the motivation to do this. If it had been something that [left] people like, sad to see the show go but man what an ending, well, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you about the fact that I went back to it, eight years later.
Most of the time when people discuss the series they kind of demarcate it as the Clyde years, up until the John Lithgow season…and then there’s everything after. But there were points in the latter half of the series that I enjoyed, like the Julia Stiles season or the Yvonne Strahovski season. When you think of that back half are there highlights that stand out to you as being moments you’re really proud of?
For sure, I feel like there were incredible episodes and storylines in those later seasons, they just didn’t cohere as cleanly and maybe the sum of the parts of those seasons weren’t as collectively satisfying. The fifth season is kind of a one off in a way. After Trinity (Lithgow) kills Rita, Dexter is reeling that somebody got the best of him, and I don’t think he ever recovered from that fundamental trauma. That’s a big part of what binds him and Harrison together [in New Blood] because the Dexter who he discovered himself to be after Rita’s death and Harrison—some version of them was born in that moment.
But yeah, we worked our asses off and explored some really interesting stuff. In a way, the show had to change. The show aspired to take responsibility for the trauma of Rita having been killed and presented a character who wasn’t able to just get over it and get on with it and keep killing people in the same way he had. The experience of the character and the show needed to be different. But it was tricky because the person who broke all the toys storytelling-wise, Clyde, then left. Not only that, but the guy who was the head of Showtime left. And I had just found out I had cancer, so I spent that whole hiatus preoccupied with chemotherapy. Then I just showed back up for the fifth season and everybody was gone. And it was weird. There was a lot of cool stuff but there was some sort of connective tissue that wasn’t there in the same way.
Every project you’ve done in the last eight years has been in such stark contrast to Dexter, I’m sure when it ended you were offered a lot of similar roles that would’ve put you in more of a box.
Two kinds of roles: one, obviously a character who, within three pages, is killing somebody or or is some sort of dark villainous something or another. Or even a happy-go-lucky villain, basically watered down Dexter. That kind of stuff I didn’t want to do. But I also was offered parts that were open-ended commitments to TV shows that could have lasted who knows how long and I didn’t want to do that either because I’d just done Six Feet Under for five years and Dexter for eight right after it. I just tried to say yes to things that invited me to do things I hadn’t done before.
Did jumping back into this world give you the itch to consider a full return to TV at some point?
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility, also there’s a lot more limited run series being made now. It isn’t a you might be doing this for a decade kind of proposition. Coming out of slash still being in the midst of the whole COVID thing, I just appreciated how nice it is to go to work everyday. I’d be crazy to forsake TV, it’s where so much of the best stuff is happening now.
What have you been watching lately?
I just watched White Lotus but I don’t know, I feel like that’s old already. But I thought that was pretty great. I really like the writing, the acting, the look of it. I liked the fact that it really boldly took on the cultural moment and managed to give voice to all the various sides of things without planting its flag anywhere and everybody was right and everybody was wrong at the same time.
I could see you in that show, actually.
Yea that would be fun. Apparently they’re going to keep doing it, different groups of crazy people are going to keep showing up in that hotel, so.