Dexter: New Blood Can’t Quite Bring Its Madcap Antihero Back to Life: Review

The post Dexter: New Blood Can’t Quite Bring Its Madcap Antihero Back to Life: Review appeared first on Consequence.

The Pitch: Over a decade after the original series’… let’s say controversial finale, Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) has been living off the grid. Last we saw him, he was a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest; now he’s packed up and moved to the sleepy, snowy upstate New York village of Iron Lake. He’s set himself up as Jim Lindsey, the unassuming town sweetheart, who mans the local hunting shop and brings cinnamon rolls to his customers.

He’s even dating the town sheriff, Angela Bishop (Julia Jones), and has successfully tamped down the so-called Dark Passenger that drives him to kill. (Instead of his adoptive father Harry, it’s taken the shape of now-deceased sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), the devil in his ear who acts as his grim anti-conscience.)

But naturally, Dexter: New Blood isn’t about to saddle us with eight episodes of ol’ Dex going ice fishing and generally being a nice guy; before long, he’s set his sights on a juicy morsel of a new target, a rich failson who totally get people killed on a boat a few years ago. That’s not all: his bloodlust coincides with the arrival of a new serial killer that’s set up shop in town, not to mention the untimely arrival of Harrison (Jack Alcott), Dexter’s now-teenage son, whom he abandoned in the finale to keep him away from his murderous life. Now he’s back with a chip on his shoulder, and more in common with Daddy than he might care to admit.

Back in Crimson: To a certain extent, Dexter: New Blood recognizes how redundant it is. The original series, based on the books by Jeff Lindsey (Dex’s new nom de plume is a clear nod to him), started out as a riveting, darkly funny take on the vigilante antihero before descending into madness, chaos, and a notoriously sloppy finale by the time it reached its eighth season. New Blood feels like an attempt to correct that sin, not to mention a convenient way for Showtime to revive a beloved IP and give Michael C. Hall more time in the role, right down to bringing back Clyde Phillips, the show’s original showrunner. Based on the four episodes provided to critics, New Blood has some of the DNA of Phillips’ original run; in its best moments, it’s sly and cheeky, and approaches the surrealistic verve of the show’s early seasons. But in switching the Miami heat for New England chill, it’s left the show feeling somewhat frozen as well.

Dexter New Blood (Showtime)

One of the more interesting wrinkles to the show’s conceit is how its small-town setting complicates Dexter’s usual M.O. By the end of the first episode, he’s fallen off the murder wagon, so to speak, but now there’s a much smaller pool of suspects on which to pin the blame — a problem even for someone of Dexter’s forensic genius. It doesn’t help that the Iron Lake Sherriff’s Department seems a bit brainier than the space cadets at the Miami Metro PD, right down to their new CSI immediately guessing the general order of events. Dexter has so much more to lose, and such fewer avenues to hide in, which makes his dilemma a bit more riveting than the relative anonymity of a bustling Florida city.

Stacked the Dex: It’s really mostly Dexter that works here, Hall slipping back into the deadpan charm of his most iconic character without skipping a beat. The problem is that Phillips and crew don’t give him as much to do, even in such a lead-fronted show; the show at its height recognized that Dex worked best when he relished his serial killing proclivities, which only come in fits and spurts of crimson here. Otherwise, the show around him doesn’t match up to his dry comic sensibilities, which leaves him with few avenues to let that twinkle out of his eye. It helps that Carpenter is back as basically a new, imaginary version of Debra that delights in twisting the figurative (and sometimes literal) knife in Dexter’s gut; she and Hall bounce off each other well.

But the supporting cast doesn’t really make much of an impression, save for Clancy Brown as the failson’s wealthy father with his own secrets. It’s all the same bunch of small-town dopes who will either serve as cannon fodder for Dexter or whatever villain he’ll face for the rest of the season or conveniently blinkered bystanders who will abandon all sense in order to maintain Dexter’s innocence. Don’t even get me started on the obnoxious true-crime podcaster (Jamie Chung), a feeble attempt to update the series for an era that has turned every passing bystander into an amateur Columbo; she’s supposed to be irritating, but after a certain point she schmoozes her way into the investigation, and I’m over here just waiting for her to turn to elk food.

Dexter New Blood (Showtime)

Kids of the Hall: The real story of New Blood, amongst the murders and Dexter’s tightrope of escaping culpability, is a father-son story in which Dexter gets to play the Harry figure this time. Alcott’s Harrison is essentially a wholly new version of the character, a mercurial drifter who quickly locks into his father’s cover story to cover his own ass, and may or may not be showing signs of the Dark Passenger himself. He’s convincingly wily in the role, but he’s too wrapped up in the high school antics of his other school-age characters, none of whom are very interesting.

Every time we cut away from Dexter’s plight onto Harrison and his school-aged friends hanging out, or Harrison’s conversations with a lonely nerd who may be planning a mass shooting at his school, New Blood becomes a tedious dirge. Dexter used to have a supporting cast that matched Hall’s innate charisma and twinkle-eyed weirdness, but the sleepy normies of Iron Lake just aren’t up to snuff.

The Verdict: At no point does Dexter: New Blood feel like anything but the latest example of networks reviving their old IPs for one last round at bat. Sure, it’s fun to see Hall up to his old tricks again, but to what purpose? Part of the problem with the old show is that it went on too long; the idea that Dexter would get away with it for this long beggared belief long before he became a lumberjack. To see it happen all over again, now with an even smaller pool of red herrings to hide behind, feels downright silly. And not the kind of silly that the show so effortlessly enjoyed during its prime years. Honestly, this is one dead body that should have probably remained buried.

Where’s It Playing? Dexter: New Blood picks up its Dark Passenger on Showtime starting November 7th.

Trailer:

Dexter: New Blood Can’t Quite Bring Its Madcap Antihero Back to Life: Review
Clint Worthington

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