"Dexter" Review: Four Perfect Seasons and a Finale Worth Defending

This show is addictive in a way very few are. Eight seasons, 96 episodes, and you will get through the good ones far faster than you meant to.

Not all of those seasons are equal, and I would put seasons 1 to 4 above anything else on television. Not just anything in its genre. Anything.

What Makes the First Four Work

The premise does a lot of the work, and it is a genuinely strange one to have made. Dexter Morgan analyses blood spatter for Miami Metro by day and kills murderers the justice system failed to catch by night, and the show puts you inside his head and asks you to enjoy his company. It came from Jeff Lindsay's novel "Darkly Dreaming Dexter" and James Manos Jr. developed it for television.

What keeps it from being a gimmick is that each of those first four seasons has a genuine antagonist with a genuine idea attached. The best is season 4 and the Trinity Killer, a performance by John Lithgow that won him an Emmy and still holds up as one of the most frightening things on television, largely because he plays a man who is boring and ordinary and utterly monstrous at the same time.

That season also ends on the single best twist the show ever pulled, and I will say nothing else about it.

Why It Drops Off Exactly When It Does

Here is the thing worth knowing, because it lines up perfectly with where most people feel the show changed.

Clyde Phillips ran the show as showrunner for seasons 1 through 4 (48 episodes) and left immediately after the season 4 finale. It was Showtime's highest-rated season; he left for family reasons, and the head writer, Melissa Rosenberg, left at the same time. Chip Johannessen took over for season 5, then Scott Buck ran seasons 6 through 8.

So the boundary people describe is not a vague sense of decline. It is the exact episode where the creative team that built the show walked out of the building. Everything after season 4 is other people working with someone else's machine.

That is not to say the later seasons are worthless. It is to say the line you can feel is real, and it has a date on it.

Michael C. Hall

You could not cast this better. The role requires an actor who can be genuinely charming while constantly making you aware that the charm is a construction being operated from somewhere further back.

Hall does that for eight years without the seams showing. The narration is the hardest part of the job, because voiceover on television usually flattens a performance, and here it deepens it: you get the polite exterior and the running commentary underneath simultaneously, and the gap between them is the entire show.

Debra Is the Best Thing in It

Debra might be my favourite character in the series, and the reason is growth.

She starts as a junior officer desperate to be taken seriously and ends somewhere unrecognisable. She is also, consistently, the funniest person in any room, and Jennifer Carpenter plays the profanity as a defence mechanism rather than a character trait, which is a much harder read.

The key thing is that Debra is the normal person. Dexter processes everything through a filter that keeps him at a distance. Debra has no such filter, which means every horror in this show lands on her at full weight. Watching what the series puts her through, and watching her keep getting up, is the emotional spine of the whole thing.

Small production note that makes the sibling chemistry stranger and better: Hall and Carpenter were married during the show's run, divorced partway through, and carried on playing brother and sister afterwards.

Is This for You

Straightforward test. If murder shows are not your thing, this one will not convert you. It is a series about a serial killer that expects you to root for him, and it never really apologises for that.

If those are your thing, this might be the best of them. I have not seen it better. The twists in the strong seasons are the kind that raise the hair on your arms, and the show is very good at making you complicit before you have noticed it happening.

In Defence of the Finale

Many people hate the ending. I do not.

"Remember the Monsters?" aired on 22 September 2013 and was quickly installed as television's standard example of a botched conclusion. Clyde Phillips has said his own version would have gone somewhere quite different.

But listen to what Dexter says about himself across eight seasons. The exhaustion with performing normality. The recurring conclusion that he damages everyone who gets close. The finale takes those statements seriously and follows them to the only place they lead: removing himself from everyone entirely, in the bleakest way available.

Is it perfectly executed? No. Does it follow from the character as written? Yes, more than its reputation allows. And it did not make me regret the near perfection that came before it, which is the test that actually matters.

The Verdict

Seasons 1 to 4 are as good as this genre gets and possibly as good as television gets. The rest declines, with real highs still in it, for reasons you can trace to specific names leaving specific jobs.

Watch it. Get through the great years, understand what changed, and give the ending a fairer hearing than it usually gets.