The murderously bad and frighteningly charming Dexter returns to TV

Deep in conversation with actor Michael C. Hall about the reboot of the iconic serial killer thriller Dexter, we come to what seems like a very binary question for 2021. Does he see Dexter as a victim or a perpetrator? Or indeed perhaps, a hero or villain? Must Dexter be one or the other, or does the question merely expose me as a cultural dinosaur looking for labels?

“I feel what’s fantastic about Dexter is that the answer to all those [questions] is yes,” Hall says. “It all operates in shades of grey and depends on your point of view. Dexter can be an absolute villain. Or he can be an absolute victim of child abuse, and he can behave within a particular frame as a hero.”

Michael C. Hall reprises the iconic role of forensic specialist-turned-vigilante in a new limited series Dexter: New Bood.Credit:Kurt Iswarienko/Showtime

Hall pauses for a moment. “And yet I think it’s undeniable that his behaviour has resulted in ... substantial suffering, not just for his victims but for the people who aren’t his victims. And [people] who he, in as much as he’s capable, loves,” Hall says. “So I think the fun of the show is that anytime a question like that comes up, the answer feels always to be both.”

In the original Dexter, which ran between 2006 and 2013, Hall played Dexter Morgan, a forensic specialist who worked by day for the Miami Metro Police Department, but who was by night a serial killer who specialised in hunting down murderers who had somehow evaded justice. Murderously bad but at the same time frighteningly charming.

The series has been rebooted as a 10-episode limited series, Dexter: New Blood, which picks up the story a decade after the original series finale and finds Dexter living in the (fictional) upstate New York town of Iron Lake. The new series is creatively led by the show’s original creator/showrunner Clyde Phillips, who wrote and produced the first four of its eight seasons, and director Marcos Siega, who was a key director in the third and fourth seasons.

The new series finds Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) living in upstate New York one decade after the events of the original series finale.Credit:Seacia Pavao/Showtime

“I don’t know that it would’ve been an absolute no [without them] and I certainly went down the road with some other possibilities, but I think in hindsight now that I’m on the other side of it, I think it always had to be Clyde because he was there for Dexter in its glory years,” Hall says.

“[With the new series] I came to appreciate what I had always appreciated, but appreciated in a new way, [which was] just how difficult a bullseye it was to hit,” Hall says. “And I knew that while there was a desire to re-contextualise Dexter and find him in a new place, both materially and internally, spiritually, psychically, we had to maintain some sense of connected tissue to who we knew him to be and what the experience of that initial show had been.

“That’s why [their] presence was fundamental,” Hall says. “This revisitation was totally unique for many reasons, one being that all the scripts were written from the beginning so we were able to shoot it as if it were a 10-hour movie. And Marcos’ presence throughout the shoot [either as director or producer]. It’s great to have that single presence as long as it’s a presence that you trust.”

The question of authorship in television is often a complex one. The medium is quite different to film, where the director’s word is law. Television is often, instead, driven by writer/producers who travel by the moniker of “showrunner”. For a show like Dexter, too, the question is made even more complex because of the deep and long-standing connection between actor and character. Which is not to say that Hall writes Dexter, but that he knows him better than perhaps anyone else.

Dexter (Michael C. Hall) and his adoptive sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter) in Dexter: New Blood.Credit:Seacia Pavao/Showtime

“When the show ended there were instances where the possibility of a return materialised and it just never felt right. I knew that a return would only happen if [a] story emerged that felt like it was worth telling. And I had to take responsibility for that feeling and take part in crafting that story.”

In a sense, while the story is creatively driven by Phillips, and traces its genesis to a series of novels written by Jeff Lindsay, beginning with 2004’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Hall was also “very much part of the conversation”, he says. “And in as much as Dexter is even knowable, I guess it’s on me to know him and to know what does and doesn’t feel right and feels [a] worthy subject for what we hope is a satisfying revisitation of this character. One that’s in part motivated by what we all know was a somewhat dissatisfying place where we left them.”

That last point is a peculiar one for this reboot. The history of television is peppered with television programs whose endings were either tearfully and lovingly applauded, or greeted with muted silence. The manner of Dexter’s ending â€" no spoilers here, for the sake of newbies catching up ahead of the reboot â€" drew an uneasy line down the middle.

Seemingly satisfactory to most, it never sat well with diehard fans. And, unusually in television, where ranks rarely break, Hall himself made no secret that he was not wholly satisfied with the show’s original ending. “We definitely had as a part of our motivation to return the dissatisfaction of the audience and our own dissatisfaction in mind,” Hall says. “I certainly support and stand by where things ended with the original series ... but I also appreciate how open-ended and fundamentally dissatisfying if not infuriating it was for people watching.

Michael C. Hall in the original Dexter, which ran from 2006-2013.Credit:Showtime

“But if that is a cloud that’s hung over the show, it has perhaps provided us a chance to create a silver lining,” Hall says. “And hopefully this return will be that. But yes, that was a big part of our awareness. And I was saddened to know that a show that was beloved and that people generally had a lot of affection for ultimately left a lot of a bad taste in people’s mouths.”

When Hall played Dexter in the original series, he came to see the two aspects of the character â€" the charming man the audience meets, and the so-called “dark passenger” within him â€" as two halves of a whole.

“When we first meet Dexter, he is more the two distinct aspects, one an authentic, monstrous serial killer and one assimilated, real-seeming person,” Hall says. “It’s really the appearance of his brother in the very first season that whets his appetite to have a more authentic experience of himself as a human being, and gets the ball rolling and causes those two separate things to intersect in more and more dangerous ways.”

But the Dexter of both the original series conclusion and the reboot is a world away from the Dexter we met in Lindsay’s book Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Hall says. “For the very reason that this simulated human being and this real monster have intersected in ways that Dexter had believed were incompatible.”

If Dexter’s darker side were to re-emerge â€" “and we’re turning the cameras back on, so we can reasonably suspect that it might”, Hall suggests â€" Dexter may be forced to deal with both aspects of himself in a way not seen before. “I don’t think anybody believes that Dexter is completely incapable of a [genuinely human] experience,” Hall says.

Which is not to say that Dexter Morgan is a good guy. But it does seem to suggest that he is not wholly a bad one. “I think to some degree he feels like [redemption] is not possible or deserved,” Hall says. “But I do also think that there’s some part of him that’s waiting for something, he doesn’t know what. And what that waiting might be for is perhaps revealed to him in this new show.”

Dexter: New Blood is on Paramount+ from Sunday.

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