In 2013, after eight years, the series about a blood-obsessed serial killer went out with high-soap bangs and then, a whimper. It ranks among the most controversial endings for a long-running series as the shot faded to black with the titular antihero sitting in a log cabin all on his own, on the other side of the country.Dexter star Michael C. Hall told news.com.au that from his perspective, the original finale “lacked a sense of closure and I knew that would likely be frustrating for people”.Hall, who played the role for nearly a decade after coming off five critically acclaimed years on HBO series Six Feet Under, admitted he was “running on fumes” by the time the series drew to a close.“Just as Dexter was reeling, I think I was reeling to a degree, running on fumes,” he confessed. “I felt like there may one day be unfinished business that revealed itself to tend to, but I was not in a place where I was champing at the bit to take that on.“I certainly stand by what happened. As far as how it was executed, perhaps we could’ve done a better job. But it was what it remains.“Maybe the cloudiness of it has the silver lining that wouldn’t have been there otherwise – and we wouldn’t have had the motivation to come back and revisit him in the way that we have.“Hopefully, whatever dissatisfaction people had was balanced with a curiosity about what he’s up to now.”That “one day” is now, with Dexter returning for a 10-episode miniseries revival, Dexter: New Blood, picking up 10 years after that lumberjack ending. He has a new name (Jim Lindsay, likely a nod to Jeff Lindsay, the author of the books Dexter is adapted from), a new home (Iron Lake in upstate New York) and a new girlfriend (a police chief played by Julia Jones), but the deadly addictions that plagued him then is lying dormant just under the surface.Of course, Dexter’s “Dark Passenger” won’t be hibernating for long. Hall explained: “When you say, ‘why now’, why now is within the fiction, the dam is going to break. While a lot of time has passed, there is one fundamental thing that has been on hold – he’s been abstinent.“And I can’t imagine that we would turn the cameras back on for another year of Dexter’s abstinence. That wouldn’t be so compelling.”During Dexter’s original run, the character was part of a wave of male antiheroes whose deplorable natures made them all the more compelling to watch. From Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey to Walter White and Don Draper, these antiheroes’ complex emotional lives made them uncomfortably easy to root for.Dexter Morgan’s foibles wasn’t misogyny, uncontrollable rage or moral compromise, he was a serial killer. On the surface, he seemed like an amiable blood splatter analyst who always brought doughnuts, asked after your day and minded his Ps and Qs. Underneath, he was a psychopath whose childhood trauma drove an insatiable blood lust. That he only killed other sociopaths was how he (and the audience) made peace with it – until he couldn’t.Over the show’s eight seasons, Dexter learnt he could have real connections with people and not just the simulacrum of a life he thought he was performing. Key to that is the birth of a son, Harrison, in the show’s fourth season.NED-3498-What-to-Watch-Article-BannersHarrison is also crucial to the revival’s existence, and why this iteration of a new series of Dexter got off the ground when, according to Hall, three or four other attempts didn’t.“[Previous revival attempts have] not always gone as far down the road but there were other instances where the possibility of returning has come up and we’ve explored ideas of what that might look like. And it never felt right.“I think it was this concept, of Dexter in Iron Lake, he’s cobbled together what he’s attempting to experience as a real life while not killing. But the linchpin is that enough time had passed for Harrison to grow into a young man and encounter Dexter, and the sort of complexity and richness of that relationship.“That’s something that just didn’t exist for us until now.“It’s the father-and-son relationship and reckoning. Dexter, quite literally, coming face-to-face with his past in the form of his full-grown son. The show, among other things, is suggesting what I think we know to be true – you can’t run from your past.“It’s like all of a sudden, both his monstrousness and his humanity are reactivated in ways that he’d been keeping at bay.”For many fans, it’s not just the return of Hall and co-star Jennifer Carpenter, it’s also the homecoming of Clyde Phillips, Dexter’s original showrunner.Phillips ran the first four seasons of the show, the years which many consider to be the series’ strongest.“In hindsight – I say hindsight because we’ve wrapped filming – it feels like it had to be [Phillips],” Hall said. “I was certainly open to the possibility, generally speaking, that someone else might fill that role.“But I’ve come to appreciate as we’ve developed and made this, what a tiny bullseye there is we’re trying to hit.“It’s doing something that feels new but maintains the connective tissue to what we knew Dexter to be in its glory days. It’s a trickier proposition to execute than it is to want to execute. And Clyde’s fundamental in that.“And Marcos Siega, who directed most of [New Blood’s] episodes and served as executive producer, had so much to do with why this felt right as well. He was a huge part of the what the show felt like way back then, and he had so much to do with how the new show looks and how the feel of it was different.“So, a lot of it was about getting the band back together.”Dexter: New Blood premieres on Paramount+ on Sunday, November 7Share your TV and movies obsessions | @wenleima
Powered by WPeMatico
