Dexter showrunner addresses original ending, calls new series "an opportunity to make that right"
Aux Features TV
As a rule, people—up to and including star Michael C. Hall, who basically gave the whole thing a “Hey, what are you gonna do about it?” shrug when asked—did not love the ending of Showtime’s Dexter. Some of that is probably down to our nation’s rampant lumber-jack-o-phobia, but a lot of it can be linked back to the show’s increasingly strident steps away from reality in its last few years on the air, and some fairly intense eye-rolling at the idea of our old pal Dexter Morgan managing to extend his magical ability to get away with anything with anyone to the literal forces of nature itself.
All of which, Dexter revival series showrunner Clyde Phillips assures you, he knows. Phillips—who has an interesting relationship with the series, in so far as most people divide the “good” and “bad” seasons of Dexter at the same point he left the series, after running it for its first four seasons—has stated that the just-announced revival series won’t “undo” anything that already happened on the series. But, Phillips noted in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s TV’s Top 5 podcast, “So far as the ending of the show, this will have no resemblance to how the original finale was. It’s a great opportunity to write a second finale.”
Phillips went on to add that, while it’s explicitly not why the new series is being made, “This is an opportunity to make that right,” in reference to the disappointing response to the show’s original 2013 finale. The new series won’t serve as a direct sequel to said logging odyssey, either, instead jumping forward the same amount of time as has passed in the real world, during which we can only assume Dexter has murdered himself a whole forest worth of trees. “We want this to not be Dexter Season 9,” Phillips said, while still making clear that, “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.”
Showtime announced the Dexter revival earlier this week, with Hall committed to returning as everyone’s favorite serial-killer-but-he’s-nice.
90 Comments
Just a reminder, one of the reasons that Dexter went the way it went is because Showtime tied the hands of the subsequent writers because they didn’t want Dexter to become too much of a villain so that they could eventually revive the character. So Showtime is getting what it wanted while writers get thrown under the bus.
Was it really just Showtime? From interviews I’ve read with the replacement show-runner Scott Buck, it sounds like he just thought Dexter was a straight-forward hero. I guess hiring him is just another way to accomplish that.
Exactly, Buck basically decided that “the fans” thought of Dexter as “Batman”, doing the dirty work the cops couldn’t, a righteous vigilante of justice, and wanted him celebrated like a hero. Watching his seasons, you can absolutely see that was the tone he was going for. An awful, terrible decision, of course.
That would only make sense if Dexter wasn’t obviously being set up as being ‘punished by being away from his family forever’ in the finale.Nah, the finale just plain sucked on every level possible.
Gave us a great AV Club review, grade (F of course) and a glorious comment section. I’d only watched the first couple of seasons long after the event and read the first few books before stopping because I did not care for any of it.
The Dark Knight ended the same way.
Well, except for the lack of chainsaws and trees.
I didn’t mean the same location.
Kind of falls down where Doakes gets killed and subsequently posthumously vilified for, well you know, doing his job (investigating suspicions, catching murderers).I never bought that given the distance between him and Dexter (and Doakes already having his gun drawn and pointing it at him) that he wouldn’t have shot Dexter about 10 times before he had a chance to close the gap. He already hated the guy, working out he was a serial killer would have sealed the deal.
“Dexter, man, I know you think you’re cleaning up the streets…but this is some sickfuck ritual shit!!!”
Wasn’t it Scott Buck who did that execrable Iron Fist series?
Yep, then somehow got hired for Inhumans too.
He sounds like someone who knows the administrative basics of how to produce a television series, but has bad creative instincts.
It was a perfect storm of those two things plus a couple of factors:The post-Season four writers, not just Buck but the writers under him, rejected the idea of Dexter as a villain and kept pushing him as a super-hero type vigilante who was never wrongAdding to this, Hall and actress Jennifer Carpenter married THEN divorced, which kill any chance of their characters getting together romantically due to the split.THAT complicated things, as everything was leading to Dexter and Deb getting together as the end game and now they couldn’t do it because the actors both didn’t want to do it given that they were now divorced. Adding to this, Showtime made it clear that they pretty much intended to keep Dexter on the air for as long as humanly possible as it was their only hit. Which meant that the writers were now actively resentful of the show and Hall, who kept taking Showtimes money until the stench of the show’s later seasons sucking as bad as they did finally made Hall turn down the truckloads of money Showtime kept dumping at his house to keep Dexter on the air.
Which in turn led to the infamous “lumberjack” ending. Showtime mandated that Dexter could not be caught for his crimes (hence the insulting ass pull where Dexter was allowed by the other cops to get away with killing the guy who shot Deb and put her into the coma she was in and why everyone was mourning Dexter instead of slowly coming to grips with the monster in their midst) and that Dexter couldn’t die. Because they were banking that Hall would eventually come back to the character, to the easy paycheck that would finance his indie art film work. To Buck and the writers’ credit, even they were pissed off at these restrictions, which is why they backed down on their hero worship of the character to give the closest they could to a comeuppance (exiled and in hiding, stuck being a lumberjack) along with killing off Carpenter’s character so she could move on with her life if and when Showtime finally got Hall to come back. Because if Showtime had their way, the show would had ZERO ending; Dexter would still be working his day job, Deb would still be alive aiding him, and Dexter would continue to kill people and his fellow cops still 100% oblivious of the monster in their midst and the show ending in away where a revival season could pick up where the show left off like it never ended.
The word is that that was also Hall’s position on the character. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
Honestly, though, I think the premise just has some inherent limits to it. Scott Buck certainly didn’t help anything, but the books apparently go off the rails in a totally different but equally insane-sounding way.
I tend to agree with that. It’s been a long time since I read the books, but iirc they definitely got weird (and not in necessarily good ways) after the first one or two.Kinda like the tv show.After a couple of those, sometimes you’re just like “eh, why am I still reading these?”Again, kinda like the tv show.
I was as fond of Dexter as anyone, but he has to die or get locked up. Also, Deb needs to love somebody else
I read somewhere that at least some of the creative team at some point (don’t remember exactly who) wanted it to end where Dexter was awaiting the lethal injection for … you know, multiple murders and he was haunted/visited by the ghosts of the people he killed but Showtime wouldn’t let them kill him.
That was Clyde Phillips’ idea, the guy doing the revival. I’m not sure how official the idea was for Showtime to shoot it down; I think he was just commenting on his own idea.
That was the idea of the S1 – 4 showrunner who’s the subject of this article. (It’s hard to write that in a way that doesn’t sound snarky. I’m not being snarky!)
I wanted Deb to arrest Dexter and testify against him, even if it cost her her career, because she was fundamentally a good person.Instead she developed a borderline incestuous infatuation with Dexter, covering up his murders, dying and then getting dumped into the ocean to rot beside all of the serial killers Dexter dumped there before her.They did Deb dirty. The character, more than any other, deserved better. This, more than any of the other dumb-fuckery that happened in the last few seasons left a bad feeling in my mouth and really just makes me hate the whole show, even the good seasons, retroactively.
In this version Dexter is a lumberjack who only cuts down other lumberjacks…with his sharp wit!
SURPRISE LUMBERFUCKER!
The old Doug Pirhana approach:
It wasn’t just the ending. The show rapidly went downhill after season 4, and was an unfettered clusterfuck waaaaay before the legendary finale.
My watch-group started to bail on it one by one. When it got to the last season, guys were leaving every single episode. “I don’t have it in me to watch even one more”, they’d say. We’d counter with “There are only six left, how can you leave now?” then “only five left” then “only four left”… etc. Finally it got down to one guy who actually quit after the penultimate episode. “I’ve seen ‘em all, but, I’m done now. F it. Won’t watch the finale.”As it was happening, it felt like each guy was crazier than the last. How can you leave after sinking so much cost into it this far into it, with so little yet to go?Yet, it turned out, each was progressively smarter and better off.
This is the best example of the Sunken Cost Fallacy I’ve ever seen.
Eh i still liked the show’s later seasons even if they weren’t as good, they’re still better then a lot of Network TV shows best seasons IMO.
This comment reminds me of the song Another New World.And the crew gathered closer, at first for the comfort, but each morning would bring a new set
Of tracks in the snow, leading over the edge of the world, til I was the only one left.
legitimately do not understand how folks lasted so long with this show. I tapped out after four episodes
Naww, Season 5 was good also. Then it went into the shitter.
Absolutely agree. I think season 5 is very strong. The show did have a lot of elements at that point that were starting to turn idiotic. The show was starting to suffer from Dexter having to constantly pretend he was busy working while going off to murder someone, something which having a baby drew a lot of attention to (I can’t remember exactly when the Catholic babysitter who kept leaving crucifixes under Harrison’s pillow came into it but at this point at least he didn’t have Angel’s sister babysitting, who you’d think might have mentioned to her brother at any time that Dexter is never home, something that might have roused suspicion). Julia Stiles is very good as (the ridiculously named) Lumen and theirs was a much more interesting pairing than Dexter and Hannah.
Yeah, I thought Julia Stiles was great. She was also able to demonstrate what I think is an underrated super power of hers. Some people are amazing cryers, but what Stiles does really well is act pants-pissingly terrified, but not in a horror movie screamy type of way.(See also the 2nd Bourne movie)
In my mind Season 8 never happened. The series ended in that storage container at the end of S7 when Deb made the “other choice”.
Dexter’s final season was a great watch because it ran almost concurrently to Breaking Bad’s. I remember gleefully hatewatching Dexter’s stupid kid run himself off a threadmill – only for that to be washed away with Vince Gilligan and co. making a pitch perfect ending.
Season 5 was pretty good, though kind of squandered the potential there with Dexter’s sister finding out that her brother was a killer. That got redeemed and thoroughly explored in that fantastic Season 7 arc.Too bad the aftermath got squandered as well in Season 8, which is by far THE WORST in series. Dexter should have been find out as killer and has his police department going after him, that would have made for great killer conclusion to the whole series.I don’t think we’ll ever get this kind of ending, but I hope they at least find the right conclusion for Dexter… not holding my breaths, though.
They didn’t even do a single “Tonight’s the night…” sequence in the last 3 seasons or so. Just completely forgot about it.
Exactly. I felt like such a jackass after watching the penultimate season, and I swear Stockholm Syndrome forced me to watch the final season- I maintain to this day the chasm between the first two seasons of that show and the last two in terms of quality is as vast as the gulf between 60 Minutes and Sean Hannity. I’ve told my friends for years that if I had known how shitty the show would get I never, ever would have started watching it in the first place, as that last season was so thoroughly bad and that last episode was so above and beyond the preceding badness. I think I have PTSD from the entire endeavor. I’m guessing Dexter’s kid becomes a serial killer and Dexter has to stop him or something ridiculous like that in the reboot. I’m going to let other people watch that shit first before I even think about tuning in again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me five times, I fucking deserve it.
Hot take: Dexter was never actually great. At its best it was a guilty pleasure carried by a strong performance by Michael C. Hall (with occasional support from single-season guest stars) and weighed down by absolutely terrible acting from pretty much the entire rest of the cast.And after the more-or-less focused and consistent first season (not coincidentally, the only one that follows the source material), all the subsequent ones—even those that are relatively well regarded—are at least 50% awful, with ever-shifting characterizations and with ludicrous and boring subplots filling time between what passes for meaningful storylines—which themselves grow stale and repetitive by no later than season three.I say this as someone who watched every episode and don’t regret doing so (though the Colin Hanks season was rough going), and might very well watch the revival as well.
Not a hot take by any means. Michael C. Hall may be the sole reason I continued watching this show until the very end.
I was also hoping we’d get to see Mazuka get blown by a bazooka.
I attended a special fan screening of the Season 4 finale in NYC back in December 2009. The showrunner was there and he took a picture of the audience reaction to the final reveal. It was a massive response.And yes, the series fell apart precipitously after that season.
If the same amount of time has passed in the real world… perhaps something about his kid… being suspected of being a serial killer which is just a frame up from an old nemesis meant to bring Dexter out of the woodwork
If he doesn’t reunite with his son I’ll riot.
I have a memory that what made season 8 even worse was that season 7 was actually pretty good and made the promise of season 8 must-watch.
Well, except for this disaster in Season 7, anyways, which is probably right up there with Lumberjack Dexter in incredibly awful ideas:
I just chalked that up to Deb being understandably messed up by everything.
No her psychologist told her it was a good idea.
Getting bad psychological advice sounds pretty messed up to me.
She was sent there because she was messed up already and then the psych was like ‘You should definitely bang the only stable person in your life who is also your only remaining family member!’ My friends and I called the woman World’s Worst Psychologist.
So messed up advice on top of already being messed up.
Sounds pretty messed up. 🙂
I know this is meta and really breaks the 4th wall a bit but I found this scene and arc great. Maybe because the emotions seemed real in the acting as the actor did marry and divorce in real life.( a divorce which it seems may have been one sided). I think you had some serious real emotions going on and it made complete sense when you looked at the way Deb acted towards Dexter as they were not blood siblings. Why so much hate for this revelation?
it was shitty cause deb was always portrayed as a good cop who always did the right thing-but hey, she’s in love with dexter, so she’ll give him a pass. Kind of like the way Clarice and Hannibal hooked up at the end of that book. Just seems out of character and disgusting.
Keep your porn parodies out of the actual show please.
Jesus.
Weren’t the actors playing Dexter and his sister already divorcing in real life when this was made just to add insult to injury?
The craziest part is that Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter got married and divorced during the show’s original run.
“…the new series won’t serve as a direct sequel to said logging odyssey…”That might be the best description of the series finale I’ve ever seen.
That last stretch of AVC reviews of this show was the stuff of legend.
ghost harry certainly thought so
Dexter (v/o): Ghost Harry thinks that
Did I miss the uproar demanding more Dexter?We live in a world where Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League caused enough fanboy uproar that it was given apparently hundreds of millions on top of the already spent budget for the original film in order to bring his arguably dubious version ‘to life’. Small cults make waves big enough to bring back any number of shows but there’s usually SOME sort of attention drawn to the group, if only to have someone to blame if it fails.Did I just miss them?
I’m not gonna lie, I wholeheartedly agree with the hate on the final season & the myriad of criticisms of 5-7, but I love that the original showrunner is getting another chance to take a shot at the character. If anything, it’s like seeing someone take over a property after Zack Snyder (in this instance Scott Buck) ran it into the ground. I’m cautiously optimistic.
I love Snyder’s DC films and i’ll defend them on my deathbed and i’m happy he’s getting another shot, i’m one of the few people in the universe who didn’t hate Dexter’s finale(it damn sure beats the godawful finales of LOST and GOT) but it definitely could’ve been better.
Haha man, Lost, Dexter, and GoT are an Unholy Trinity of Bad Finales.
eh i’d put How I Met Your Mother over Dexter.
How much of it was Hall wanting another shot at the show? There had to be a bit of reaching out—”Would you be interested….?” and back and forth with the story, but the announcement was the first time I had heard anyone was even thinking about it.
I heard Hall was not really looking for another run, but if it did happen he would do it. He stated that the show character changed him and he had to re-learn acting with emotions from what playing Dexter took from him. Hall stated he would be on board but i do not think he was pushing for it.
Interesting! Yeah he does have a problem, I have a hard time seeing him as something else other than that character. He has not been very busy since the series ended, unlike Bryan Cranston from BB, who has been working non-stop. But what could he do that we haven’t already seen in all those seasons? Picard explores different possibilities and Stewart approached it in a seasoned way. If Hall really wants to do this I am hoping there is some growth or change to make it compelling…
Yeah try rewatching Six Feet Under after seeing Dexter. Changes the whole experience.
Ha, I bet! I LOVED Krause on that show and the whole run and finale were entertaining but for some reason I am not interested in revisiting the series, perhaps another time.
No me either, I watched it piecemeal once, all the way through another time, and that is enough. It really was Krause’s show, despite the entire cast being fantastic. I’m surprised and kinda disappointed that besides Parenthood we haven’t seen him in more good stuff, and that show was great but too vanilla for me.
Ooh, got a story~ Several years ago I was walking with friends and doing some shopping here in northern Cali…Sebastopol. I was talking about Krause earlier—about some show he was on, I forget, but mentioned how much I enjoy him, whatever he does (even the 911 show he is on now, I think it is a bit cheesy but I love him in it) Anyway we stopped at the bakery in town and noticed a guy in the front of the line getting coffee who looked sort of like him, but kinda frowsy, unshaven, sunglasses, etc. My friends were making fun saying “There he is, go get him!” etc., and I found out from friends who live there—it WAS him! He was living there for awhile with family. Anyway, weird he appeared on the same day I had a random conversation in his name.
I’ve wondered the same thing. He was the heart of a show that had one of the best finales of all time and the star of a show that had one of the worst. It’s really something.
Great point—maybe he thought there was enough buzz to carry him through again? Umm, no, it turns out.
The closest thing to a “clamor” for Dexter’s return was to bring back the original show runner to do a tv movie or “deboot”, wiping out everything after Rita’s death so he could do his original plan for season five (Dexter on the run, eventually getting caught, and being executed by the state and his last minutes spent surrounded by his fellow murderers as they wait to collectively take him to hell to hammer home that Dexter was evil).
Was it ever established that Ghost Dad didn’t have a magic stopwatch that could rewind time? If they never said Ghost Dad doesn’t have a magic stopwatch that can rewind time then maybe Ghost Dad could use his magic stopwatch to rewind to right before Doakes was killed and we can do over from there.
I’m just sad that I’ll probably never watch Dexter, no matter how good the first seasons were and no matter if it’s good when it comes back. I reeeeeally don’t wanna sit through the bad ones knowing exactly how bad they are. And I can’t not do it if I start. Just the way I’m wired.I still wonder if I should bother with Game of Thrones knowing what I know about the final season.
eh I didn’t think they were bad at all, I learned long ago not to take what AV Club says as gospel, their absolutely atrocious negative reviews of season 3 of The Newsroom firmly ingrained that belief in my mind.
I don’t think it’s as bad if you binge it. I binged the whole series … I’m not sure when, probably pretty soon after it ended. I remember the broad strokes of it, but can’t recite which season was which like many can. If you’re eagerly awaiting a new season live, you can more easily be disappointed when it’s not up the same quality (your impression of which can be heightened in the anticipation), but when you’re rolling through the contrast isn’t as bad.I recall thinking at the finale “wow, that’s dumb.” If you’re part of a larger audience watching it and discussing it as it airs, you get more invested in a belief as to how it should end, or what an ending has to do, and it’s more disappointing.But it’s not really like Game of Thrones, in which many story threads that the show told you to remember and were important were just not because they decided to throw as much spectacle as possible into a few hours and call it an ending.
Man, that’s slightly disappointing. I would love an alternate timeline after season 4. Not so much in the sense that, as stated above, “it was all a dream”, but rather that “none of it ever happened at all and what are you even talking about, there are no seasons 5-8″.
Nevermind the original ending! The original beginning shoulda been
IS
DEXTER
Considering what Dexter does, I doubt that there can ever be an ‘OK’ finale. Ordinary folk do it with hard work, not moonlighting as exciting sexy vigilante killers.
y’know, you cross enough lines in this world and there’s no going back, no repairing the damage, and no happy endings. he doesn’t deserve one.
Dude the show was swiftly going downhill long before the ending: I remember the psychologist that told Deb to fuck Dexter.That said, I think I”m going to watch it with my old watch group, if nothing else we can have a few beers and laugh at the fact that Dexter was ACTUALLY in that logging camp because they were a group of EVIL SERIAL KILLER LOGGERS!
No. This show can rot at the bottom of the ocean forever.
I’m sorry but Deb was such a bad actress it was painful to watch. That on top of the ridiculous storyline.
has stated that the just-announced revival series won’t “undo” anything that already happened on the series. PASS.
My thoughts exactly. I was hoping they could somehow bring Deb and Doakes back from the dead to make the show great again.
Just as long as his son and the full grown adult male that they had in for the falling down stunt double are still on that treadmill.
Deb from Dexter was one of the best characters on tv at one point – a real way with words rivalling Al Swearengen! Maybe it was the real life relationship that messed with the chemistry of the siblings. Maybe it was the problem too many show runners have with making female characters more than nags or sex objects. Poor Deb was ill served by later seasons, becoming dumber and dumber! Can’t even remember how she ended up but I know it was something bad…!
I know this opinion is unpopular, but I was happy with how the original series ended. Part of that is my personal horror of capital punishment itself. I shipped Hannah and Dexter hard, and I was glad that at least she got away; I also thought Harrison’s best chance at life would be with resourceful Hannah, who seemed like she could love him. I don’t agree that Dexter is a hero, but I did like him and Hannah as anti-heroes. Dexter’s exile to the forests seemed apt, somehow. I viscerally hated Arthur Mitchell even before he killed Rita. It would have been okay with me if the series had ended there. The beginning of season 5 is so rough. On the other hand, I thought the Lumen story and Travis Marshall and Professor Gellar were awesome. The Dr. Vogel character was wonderfully acted but badly written – I dig the idea of an unethical therapist (Hannibal was awesome), but suspending disbelief was too difficult with her.
I re-watched the first few episodes and found that my main beef with the show was always there. I realized I just started to focus on it more in later seasons.
Dexter’s escapes from being discovered were just plain ridiculous. He would get painted into a corner and at the last second emerge completely unscathed.The only redeeming part of this were the one or two characters like Doakes that just wouldn’t let it go. So they eventually had to be killed off despite being one of the best reasons to watch the show. Just another reason to hate those escapes.