A Guide to the Dexter Spinoffs
Get your plastic wrap, because it's a MESS!
Dexter: Resurrection is coming back this month, but what does that mean!? Which Dexter is THIS Dexter? Wait, HOW many Dexters are there? Well, buckle up, friends, because I’m going to take you through the different spinoffs. The original series aired on Showtime, which no longer exists. Where can you watch them now? They live on Paramount+.
I present them to you here, in chronological order.
1.
Dexter
This is the original one, the OG Dexter. Four perfect seasons followed by one dicey-but-okay season followed by a genuinely terrible season followed by a pretty good season followed by a genuinely demented ending. That’s eight seasons, and that’s Dexter.
Number of seasons: 8
Years: 2006-2013
Setting: Miami, FL
Who plays Dexter?: Michael C. Hall
2.
Dexter: New Blood
Picking up EIGHT years after the series finale, Dexter: New Blood is about how Dexter has been living under an assumed name in a basically-Canadian backwater of upstate New York when his teenaged son (remember little Harrison from the original series?) suspects that he might not actually be dead and comes to look for him. Lots of ice-cold suspense in this one.
Number of seasons: 1
Years: 2021
Setting: Upstate New York
Who plays Dexter?: Michael C. Hall
3.
Dexter: Original Sin
Dexter: Original Sin is a throwback! It’s an origin story, about collegiate Dexter getting his first job at the Miami homicide forensics department, and making friends with/getting to know all the folks he’ll come to work with in the regular series, which takes place years later. Although the series is technically a prequel, it functions as an extended flashback sequence between the events of Dexter: New Blood, and Dexter: Resurrection. The casting in this thing is incredible… characters genuinely look like younger versions of the characters we know from the series (especially James Martinez’s Angel Batista… wow, he gets David Zayas’s voice down perfectly). But despite the marvels of its aesthetic continuity, a lot of the show’s narrative is a bit revisionist, changing details we remember from (or literally saw in flashbacks in) the original series. I also don’t love the central mystery, but hey, what can you do?
Number of seasons: 1
Years: 2024-2025
Setting: Miami, Fl
Who plays Dexter?: Patrick Gibson and Michael C. Hall
4.
Dexter: Resurrection
Ah, and now were come to the current beast! Dexter: Resurrection comes after the brouhaha of New Blood (and after the extended flashback frame of Dexter: Original Sin), bringing our antihero to New York City, where he must stop a serial killer who seems to have a connection to a whole bunch of serial killers. Oh, and work out things with his son. That’s all I’ll say.
Number of seasons: 2
Years: 2025-current
Setting: New York City
Who plays Dexter?: Michael C. Hall
Olivia Rutigliano
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, AirMail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. She hosts the podcasst "Culture Schlock" at Lit Hub Radio. She is on instagram at @oldebean, twitter at @oldrutigliano, and bluesky at @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social.
