The new Dexter: Resurrection is the fourth series TV’s favorite serial killer has sired. In the original Dexter actor Michael C. Hall portrayed a young man who was either born with an urge to kill or acquired it when a drug dealer executed his police informant mom, leaving toddler Dexter and his pre-teen brother with her dismembered body in the back of an 18-wheeler. The audience, I believe, thinks he's adopted by a homicide detective (actor James Remar except in the flashback series where dad is played by Christian Slater) who gives him a code: he’s only allowed to satisfy his lust by killing other killers. He’s an Old Testament commandment incarnated.
After eight seasons Dexter went into hiding; he was in danger of being exposed as Miami’s “Bay Area Butcher.” He violated daddy’s code by killing, or allowing to be killed, some of his fellow cops (Dexter has gone into forensics), who were beginning to suspect his secret identity.
Almost a decade later, in 2021, he returns as Dexter: New Blood, a man living simply in a rural arctic community. Until a local wealthy serial killer comes to his attention, a killer preying on runaways. Dexter takes him out, but then has to accommodate a teenage son who’s tracked him down, a son he’d abandoned in the lower 48 years ago. (Abandoned out of a paternal instinct—everyone Dexter gets close to ends up dead by some other criminal’s hands.) A son whom he thinks may have the same bloodlust, so he teaches him the code. And then has the son shoot him and leave him for dead, since threats of exposure have led Dexter once again to kill innocents, in violation of his code.
In 2024 we got a flashback series, Dexter: Original Sin, wherein a younger Irish actor, Patrick Gibson, portrays Dexter in his college years, chronologically before the original series in dramatic time.
And now in 2025 there’s Dexter: Resurrection, where Dexter, who narrowly survived being shot (the arctic cold slowed his blood loss until he was found) tracks his son (Jack Alcott) down to the son’s new job as a Manhattan luxury hotel bellhop. Where the son has just killed a serial rapist in self-defense (when he attempts to save a drugged woman from sexual assault). And disposed of the body using the butchering techniques and crime scene cleanup skills Dexter has taught him.
So far it’s a great show, and star-studded: Neal Patrick Harris and Krysten Ritter play serial killers whose “trophies” are sought and purchased and whose bills are paid, by Peter Dinklage as an eccentric billionaire. Dinklage keeps a military trained and Harvard Law-educated Uma Thurman on staff to manage his illegal and dangerous hobby. Dexter: Resurrection steals a bit from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (Netflix), which in its first season imagined a conference for serial killers at a suburban American hotel, where the predators could share stories and tips. Dinklage’s character hosts a monthly gourmet dinner for his serial killer retainers, in the palatial basement where he has a museum of his wards’ trophies.
These shows are popular. This one has three spinoffs, two still spinning. (There are also at least three films or mini-series based on Dexter that don’t star Michael C. Hall.) I think we like these shows—Dexter, Kleo, Killing Eve—because the serial killer is a powerful being who faces death and survives it. Mainly because he (or she) is facing someone else’s death, and in control of it since he (or she) is causing it. They’re soiled, bloody, needy, deranged Olympians, or at least their bastard demigod children. They’re like another cult fiction favorite, the vampire, though the serial killer’s methods of dispatch are less erotic than the vampire’s hypnosis, biting, and sucking. As with vampires, we aren’t allowed to love Dexter unless he acts morally: Bella Swan can love Edward Cullen and Buffy can love Angel only because these good vampires have sworn off killing innocents.
Unlike vampires the serial killer can’t create his own immortal and ageless lover out of the pick of his victims. Dexter keeps finding a wife or girlfriend and now wants a relationship with a son. He’s the bicurious version of a homicidal psychopath. A son is the being you create who replaces you, a mélange of your mortality and your only shot at a kind of immortality. Coincidentally both of the young actors, 26-year-old Tennessean Jack Alcott and Patrick Gibson, have much more expressive faces than does Hall, and Gibson is more gorgeous.
For Dexter, in the new series, saving his son and wanting to know him risks his undoing, pulling him into the public eye. It’s likely the showrunners will have him meet a bad end, or once again disappear to a distant corner of the globe. It’s hard to imagine what the next spinoff would be: Dexter as a war zone medic? Dexter as a government assassin? Dexter abducted by aliens? Even with his father’s code, it's unclear how a serial killer fits into society.