“Dexter” showrunner Clyde Phillips says he won’t be erasing the final season of the show to do his reboot but he promises a better ending this time around…
Clyde Phillips was largely responsible for the most well received and well liked seasons of “Dexter” but he left the show after the critically acclaimed fourth season, which featured Jon Lithgow as the serial killer known as Trinity.
In the aftermath of Phillips’ exit, “Dexter” remained a top series on Showtime but generally speaking the show never maintained the same level of storytelling or satisfying narrative as those first four seasons. Particularly, “Dexter’ took a major hit for the disjointed final season and the last episode that saw Dexter abandon his old life in Miami following the death of his sister Deb before it was revealed that he’s now living under an assumed identity working as a lumberjack in some undisclosed location.
It was a bizarre and almost universally despised ending for longtime “Dexter” fans.
Well now “Dexter” will return with a special 10 episode reboot headed to Showtime in 2021 with Michael C. Hall set to return as the serial killer with a code and Phillips will be back as showrunner. While the reboot had many people believing that perhaps Phillips would just abandon the final season of “Dexter” all together and just create a different ending, he says that’s not what he’s got planned.
“We’re not undoing anything,” Phillips said about his plans for ‘Dexter’ when speaking to the Hollywood Reporter. “We’re not doing movie magic. We’re not going to betray the audience and say, ‘Whoops, that was all a dream’ or whatever it is. What happened in the first eight years happened in the first eight years. This is now, however many years later. We’re not undoing anything.
“Michael was certainly aware that the ending wasn’t well-received — and I believe that he was not completely satisfied with it. This is an opportunity to make [the ending] right, but that’s not why we’re doing it. We’re doing this because there is such a hunger for ‘Dexter’ out there.”
An interesting side note to those comments came from actress Jennifer Carpenter, who played Dexter’s sister Debra Morgan for all eight seasons.
While her character died in the final season, she seemed to tease her return to “Dexter” in a post on her Instagram account after news of the rebooted series was first made public.
Regardless of Carpenter’s return, Phillips promises that the new installment of “Dexter” will offer fans a more satisfying conclusion to the story, which simply wasn’t achieved in the original version.
“We basically do get to start from scratch,” Phillips said. “We want this not to be Dexter season 9. I mean, 10 years have passed — or however many years have passed by the time this will air — and the show will reflect that time passage.
“As for the ending of the show, this will have no resemblance to how the original finale was, and it’s a great opportunity to write a second finale for our show.”
Phillips famously said after “Dexter” initially ended in 2013 that his plan for the show was to feature an execution scene that saw Dexter Morgan finally pay for his many crimes as he received a lethal injection as he stared out at an audience of his victims.
It’s not clear of Phillips would rehash any of those ideas for the reboot but obviously he has plans for the 10 episode limited series that will begin filming in 2021.
Keep an eye out for more “Dexter” as news about casting and production draws closer.
