"Dexter" Returning To Showtime For 10-Part Limited Series!

For television shows that achieve multi-season success and the opportunity to go out on its own terms, the pressure to stick the ending is enormous. Some manage to do it, and some just… don’t. One of the most notorious “don’ts” in TV history has to be the final season of Showtime’s “Dexter”.

The first 7 seasons of the show, about a Miami PD blood spatter analyst (played by Michael C. Hall) who is also secretly a serial killer, were nothing short of brilliant. Twists and turns and nerve-wracking near-misses were weekly occurrences, as Dexter constantly managed to keep his cop co-workers from discovering his crimes. Indeed, the only person close to him through the duration of the series to find out his secret was his sister Deb (Jennifer Carpenter), and she was… pretty cool about it?! Some of his co-workers, like Sgt. Doakes (played by Erik King and the source of the “Surprise, motherf***er!” meme), had their suspicions, but somehow Dexter was able to thwart them.

Look, when you tell a story like this, where the main character has an earth-shattering secret, you enter into an unspoken contract with your audience. In the case of “Dexter”, that contract was “He will be discovered and get his comeuppance in the end.” The true suspense, and the reason we kept watching, was to see exactly HOW that unfolded. Would he confess? Would he finally slip up in a way he couldn’t talk his way out of? Would he just plain get caught?

How about: None of the above?

Ummm… excuse me, WHAT?

That is what nearly everyone was asking themselves when the series finale aired back in September of 2013. After nearly a decade of waiting to see how Dexter would finally be exposed, we instead saw him successfully escape Miami with his dead sister in tow and end up… a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest. The End. It was one of the biggest “whomp-whomp” endings in TV history and to this day is included in Worst Finales Ever lists.

BUT! All might not be lost and wrongs may very well be righted! Showtime has just announced a 10-episode limited series taking place 8 years after the notorious finale, with Hall returning to role that won him a Golden Globe and 5 consecutive Emmy nominations and Clyde Phillips returning as showrunner (he left after Season 4). There are no details yet on what the new series will actually cover, but… we can sort of guess, no? Seems like this is Showtime’s attempt to rewrite the ending of this series after the crash and burn 8 years ago. While it would have been nice to have a satisfying ending back in 2013, better late than never, I say!

Production will begin in early 2021; stay tuned!