Dexter endures because it's comfort TV

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https://slate.com/culture/2025/08/de...paramount.html

In 2025, there is somehow more Dexter than ever. I think I know why.

By Joshua Rivera
Aug 22, 20255:45 AM

Arriving in the fall of 2006, Showtime’s Dexter followed the exploits of a serial killer who exclusively stalked other serial killers and wicked folk. The series, based on the novels by Jeff Lindsay, gave depth to its macabre thrills by way of a classic moral quandary: Was protagonist Dexter Morgan, played by Michael C. Hall, a good person who did bad things, or a bad person who deluded himself into believing he was good? Thanks to the show’s peers in the prestige-TV heyday known as the Second Golden Age of TV—concurrent with the peak of Lost mania, 30 Rock’s freshman year, and the beginning of the end for The Sopranos and Deadwood—Dexter seemed like it was part of the same movement, Showtime’s first contender in an increasingly crowded field of challengers to HBO’s prestige throne. But as one season bled into eight, viewers and critics began to wonder: Was Dexter a good show that had fallen on rough times? Or a bad show that had merely fooled us into thinking it was good?

The 2013 series finale, “Remember the Monsters?,” was so poorly received that it pretty definitively answered this question for most: Dexter was bad, its best days over after the gruesome end of its fourth season, in which—years-old spoiler warning—Dexter discovers the body of his wife, murdered by the serial killer he had finally succeeded in taking out. But I would go even further in this retroactive condemnation of the series: Dexter, contrary to popular opinion and critical consensus at one point, had always been a fraudulent case of prestige TV. It was a premise born of dorm-room faux-profundity that only had enough gas in the tank to carry it for two seasons, tops. So it was a blessing when it finally limped to a conclusion and we could finally be free of it. No one, it seemed, was clamoring for more—and yet, nearly two decades later, there’s somehow more Dexter than ever. There was the 2021 revival miniseries Dexter: New Blood, in which Dexter—another years-old spoiler alert—supposedly died; the prequel series Dexter: Original Sin; and, as of this summer, Dexter: Resurrection, a follow-up to New Blood that’s built to be a full-on sequel series. And there’s still more to come: A second prequel, following the “Trinity Killer” villain of Season 4, is in the works.

How is it that Dexter has lived and died and been brought back to life so many times? Like most programming decisions in the 2020s, the rationale for all this is simple: Streaming platforms need recognizable brands, and Paramount+ can’t live on Star Trek alone. Showtime and Paramount+ (which are slowly merging into one brand under the latter name) made a bet with New Blood, and each subsequent hit of nü-Dexter has been met with ratings success. Is this because the new shows have reached the glory days of yore? Not really, despite showrunner Clyde Phillips, who oversaw the original Dexter at its peak, returning to oversee the murder empire once more. It’s more simple than that: Dexter: Resurrection is the final stage in Dexter fully embracing the trashy show it always was, deep down inside.

Self-seriousness, in the end, was the real killer. Dexter: Resurrection, which premiered in July, doesn’t fully ditch the moral handwringing of its predecessor, but it does place Dexter Morgan in a ridiculous situation befitting its macabre and absurd hero: a private club of serial killers put together by Manhattan venture capitalist Leon Prater (Peter Dinklage, having a blast), a fanboy who collects artifacts from the most notorious murderers in the world. There’s a light air of parody to this, the assembled club members noting how nice it is to have a place they can really speak freely, recalling any number of recently popular social movements built around being anti-woke. The show really isn’t that thoughtful, though—it’s more interested in the irony of Dexter Morgan finally stumbling upon a bunch of people who understand him and feeling compelled to kill them all anyway.

Resurrection, however, is also playing to longtime Dex-heads, liberally sprinkling old Dexter characters like Detective Angel Batista (David Zayas) in with its flashy new cast (with actors like Krysten Ritter and Uma Thurman joining Dinklage). Resurrection is also, bafflingly, a continuation of New Blood’s story, which involves Dexter’s estranged son, Harrison (Jack Alcott), and the question of how much like his father he really is. The show is fan service, but of a more deft sort than Dexter: Original Sin, which veers into unintentional comedy with its cast of Spirit Halloween renditions of the original characters.

For much of Dexter’s initial run, professional opinion-havers wrestled with its popularity, wondering what it might mean that a charming sociopath resonated so deeply with viewers. Lindsay, the author of the crime novels the show is inspired by, mused about this in the New York Times, concluding that rubbernecking at the grotesque isn’t really a mark of deviance, but an affirmation of humanity. Critics grappling with how Dexter Morgan’s violence had become mundane posited that, as with any horror work, the show offered a safe space to deal with one’s feelings of mortality, as initial revulsion gives way to accepting one’s own discomfort, and clearing the way for deeper introspection. There were also moral panics, with a whole section of the Dexter Wikipedia page devoted to the real-life murderers who claimed to be, or were claimed to have been, inspired by the show. And, naturally, there were many who believed—not without reason—that the show had little to offer beyond its provocations.

In the very different context of 2025, Dexter: Resurrection mostly just feels ridiculous. Less perverse than perfunctory, beholden to a rule book written nearly 20 years ago. No longer shocking enough to be an avatar of moral decay in entertainment, Dexter Morgan is more akin to Adrian Monk or any number of procedural heroes, a man broken in a way that makes him incompatible with society, but excellent at catching bad guys. The uncanny ease with which Hall plays the character, even when inconsistently written, is part of the allure—his affectless narration a warm blanket, providing an ironic distance from the gore.

And maybe that’s the true attraction. Everything about Dexter, from its quality to its cultural context and place in the prestige-TV canon, feels like settled business by now. A show so commonplace can no longer be transgressive, and while nü-Dexter is happy to incorporate the trappings of our more modern ills—rideshares and true-crime obsessives and venture capitalists—it’s not particularly interested in how the world has changed, unless it makes for a more interesting challenge for Dexter Morgan to surmount. This withdrawal is maybe the most interesting thing about Dexter as a cultural figure: Take away the murder, and Dexter is the Iron Man of the male loneliness epidemic, an incel-coded guy who is vaguely frustrated by his inability to fit into society, but convinced it is his superpower.

Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to watch all of these Dexter sequels and spinoffs. They have a kinship with the medium most associated with the modern Lonely Man and Paranoid Woman: the podcast. These days, there’s something particularly appealing about passing the time with Dexter Morgan’s droll tones and dry humor, a voice that feels like a friend’s, ordering a chaotic world into heroes and villains, turning your greatest fears into background noise, a soothing patter you can fold laundry to.