Dexter: New Blood (2021) kicks off right where the original Dexter ended. Well, eight years later, allowing for some much needed evolution in Dexter Morgan’s character since what is widely regarded as the most disappointing series finale of all time. 

When we last saw Dexter, he was a lumberjack in upstate New York. He’d killed his “Dark Passenger,” the inner voice through which he projects his darkest desires alongside manifestations of his dead father. 

Returning to the snowy little NY hamlet in 2021, our favorite TV serial killer has put down roots. He’s living under the alias Jim, has a cop girlfriend (this won’t end well), and is a fixture in a small town thankfully not filmed on the distractingly recognizable Stars’ Hollow sound stage. Deb, his sister who was unceremoniously killed off in the 2013 finale, manifests as his guilty conscious, a substitution for his long dead father who used to play that role. 

A TV revival years after the fact is a tricky thing to pull off. Thankfully, this is closer to Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return than Fox’s Prison Break: Resurrection. It’s still unmistakably Showtime, like the former, and so it retains all the hallmarks of not-quite-prestige-TV that the original run of Dexter suffered from, but man is it great to see Michael C. Hall back in his best role. 

Smartphone apps and weed vapes are set dressing to remind us this show is set in the present—otherwise, it maintains the tone of the first four seasons of Dexter without retreading old territory. I started to film a particularly beautiful long take for my Snapchat story before a sudden twist shocked me into putting my phone down. It’s hard to go too in depth without spoiling the major plot points of the episode, so I’ll stick to discussing developments already spoiled by promotional materials:

Harrison is back, and he’s older now. We don’t yet know how he tracked Dexter—sorry, Jim—down, but I have an inkling we’ll see his adoptive mother appear later in the season, provided Yvonne Strahovski isn’t too busy in her own evolved role as the new Big Bad on Handmaid’s Tale. Dexter kills, again, for the first time in almost a decade, and the situation is a tad contrived but takes advantage of the episode’s slow deliberation to incorporate new set pieces which will undoubtedly return in future episodes. Chekhov’s gun does go off, but not when you’d expect.

All in all, Dexter: New Blood feels less needless than other recent revivals. Is that a good enough reason not to let sleeping dogs lie? Probably not, but John Lithgow is slated to return, so count me in for this new season as a pre-Succession apéritif every Sunday night.