Is Dexter Morgan back? Investigate the TV show’s possible comeback

Dexter fans: listen up! Michael C. Hall has agreed to partake in Showtime’s reprise of the beloved show, (hopefully with a little more murdering than chopping down trees this time, if you catch our drift.) Here’s everything we know about the exciting TV show reboot so far.

More of our favorite serial killer

Showrunner Clyde Phillips has agreed to return for the new 10-episode season. Showtime has scheduled a winter shoot, with the TV show hitting the air in Fall 2021. 

Showtime’s president, Gary Levine, released a statement about the reboot. “Dexter is such a special series,” he said, “both for its millions of fans and for Showtime, as this breakthrough show helped put our network on the map many years ago.” 

Levine continued: “We would only revisit this unique character if we could find a creative take that was truly worthy of this brilliant, original series. Well, I am happy to report that Clyde Phillips and Michael C. Hall have found it, and we can’t wait to shoot it and show it to the world!” 

Redemption at last

Even if you weren’t a die-hard Dexter fan, chances are you remember the reaction to the series finale, which was, to put it lightly . . . a little disappointing. The fast-paced & inventive TV show wrapped up with Dexter Morgan faking his own death and becoming a . . . lumberjack? Did we just get pranked?!

Hall sympathized with fans’ disappointed reactions. He told the Daily Beast that he thought the finale “was narratively satisfying – but it was not so savory. I think the show had lost a certain amount of torque.”

Hall continued: “Just inherently because of how long we’d done it, because of the storytelling capital we’d spent, because our writer may have been gassed . . . Maybe some people wanted a more satisfying . . . ending for him, either a happy ending or a more definitive sense of closure.”

Recently, Hall told the Daily Beast that the not-so-sweet ending was one of the main reasons he agreed to partake in a reboot. “Let’s be real, people found the way that show left things pretty satisfying,” he said. “And there’s always been a hope that a story would emerge that would be worth telling.” 

“I include myself in the group of people that wondered, ‘What the hell happened to that guy?’ So I’m excited to step back into it,” Hall explained. “I’ve never had that experience of playing a character this many years on.”

What’s next for Dexter?

While not a lot of details have been released about the new season of Dexter just yet, fans haven’t stopped theorizing about what’s next for their favorite serial killer. Hall promised the next chapter will be both compelling & satisfying as conversations with Showtime about continuing the story have been “ongoing”. 

Hall added that “I think enough time has passed where it’s become intriguing in a way that it wasn’t before.” He also assured the Hollywood Reporter that, “We’re not undoing anything. We’re not going to betray the audience and say, ‘Whoops, that was all a dream.’ What happened in the first eight years happened in the first eight years.”

After the premiere of Dexter’s finale, Clyde Phillips told fans how he wanted to end the series, which only frustrated us more. “In the very last scene of the series,” he told E!, “Dexter wakes up. And everybody is going to think, ‘Oh, it was a dream.’ And then the camera pulls back and back and back and then we realize, ‘No, it’s not a dream.’

“Dexter’s opening his eyes and he’s on the execution table at the Florida Penitentiary. They’re just starting to administer the drugs and he looks out through the window to the observation gallery. 

“And in the gallery are all the people that Dexter killed – including the Trinity Killer and the Ice Truck Killer (his brother Rudy), LaGuerta who he was responsible for killing, Doakes who he’s arguably for, Rita, who he’s arguably responsible for, Lila. All the big deaths, and also whoever the weekly episodic kills were. They are all there.”

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While details are still pending, it’s safe to say that Dexter finally is going to get a TV redemption arc. So, get ready to watch Hall take off that flannel and get back on the killing slab.