New Dexter event series will give the show “a proper finale”
By Dan Selcke
Dexter, a show about a serial killer who tries to only murder criminals, is one of the biggest hits that Showtime ever aired. It’s also one of the most controversial thanks to a series finale that was widely derided as unsatisfying; seriously, next to Game of Thrones it’s hard to think of a series finale that got that much backlash.
The Dexter finale aired in 2013. Now, Showtime is getting the band back together for 10 more episodes that pick up a decade after where they left off, with Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) living in anonymity in the small town of Iron Lake, New York, having left his serial killer past behind him. But we’ll see how long that lasts.
“Dexter is a jewel in the crown for Showtime. We always wanted to see if we can do it right,” Showtime exec Gary Levine said at the Television Critics Association’s 2021 summer press tour. “It took a long time for us to get there, and for Michael C. Hall to [come back]. We finally got to a place that I can’t wait to show it to you and the world. It’s a proper finale for a brilliant series.”
Jennifer Carpenter (Debra Morgan) and John Lithgow (Arthur Mitchell) will return for the new show, which could be tricky since both their characters died in the original. Flashbacks? Dream sequences? In any case, the Dexter revival premieres on November 7.
Showtime explains why the Halo show left for Paramount+
Dexter wasn’t the only thing the Showtime folk talked about. They also discussed the status of the Halo TV show, based on the hugely popular Xbox video games. The show, which will star Pablo Schreiber as the alien-blasting Master Chief, began life at Showtime but eventually moved to Paramount+. To hear Levine tell it, the series just wasn’t a good fit.
"We were intimately involved with the creative and the production of it. But the truth is it was always a bit of an outlier for us in terms of the fitting into the Showtime universe. We did an amazing job of imbuing the character drama we’re known for. But in the end, it’s big broad tentpole show. So when Paramount+ came into being, it was really a natural fit there."
Fellow exec Jana Winograde got in another dig: “What is Showtime doing taking a first-person shooter video game and putting it in their dramas?” Am I the only one who gets a whiff of protesting too much from this? I think Showtime would be happy to have a “big broad tentpole show” on its roster, but given how expensive those series are becoming perhaps couldn’t make one that didn’t break the bank, hence the exodus to Paramount+. Talk like this sort of comes off as “well, we didn’t want it anyway,” but I dunno.
There’s no release date for Halo show as of yet.
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