Will New Blood Heal Old Wounds?

Fans’ opinion of Dexter has had a lot of up and downs over the years. A new miniseries might redeem the show after a controversial finale.

It’s not often that you get a second chance to say goodbye — or at least, that’s how it used to be.

As the Golden Era of prestige TV fades into history, and as audiences’ appetite for nostalgia grows larger, iconic television series are seizing the opportunity to extend their legacies. That opportunity is an especially tantalizing one for shows with controversial finales that left their viewers wanting more, or in some cases, something different altogether. A Game of Thrones prequel series is in the works at HBO Max, hot on the heels of the Sopranos prequel movie The Many Saints of Newark. A That ‘70s Show spinoff called That ‘90s Show has been greenlit by Netflix, while NBC continues to fuel rumors of a The Office reboot.

In November, the iconic Showtime crime thriller Dexter is set for a return of its own. Dexter: New Blood will be a limited series that picks up 10 years after the events of the original show’s finale, which left plenty of fans feeling cold. The challenge for Showtime won’t be finding fans of the original series: it’s still highly popular, ranked #1 on prestigious Ranker lists like The Creepiest Thriller Series Ever Made, The Best Showtime Shows Of All Time, Ranked, and The Greatest TV Shows About Serial Killers. Rather, Showtime’s problem is reinvigorating a fan base that, by the end of the show’s eight-season run, had lost faith in Dexter. We at Ranker would argue that while Dexter’s audience has been disappointed before, they’ve also been successfully brought back into the fold — as they were, for example, after the show’s critically acclaimed seventh season. It’s up to Showtime to convince viewers that New Blood will be a return to form for the series, and to do that, the network will need to know what about the original Dexter worked for its audience, and what didn’t.

We’re taking a look at how Dexter’s fans have waxed and waned in their opinion of the show over the course of the last decade to support our argument that New Blood has an opportunity to win over even the most cynical of Dexter fanatics, and to demonstrate more generally how fluid a fan base’s opinions can be over time.

High Point: September 2011

In 2011, popular opinion on Dexter was still relatively high — the Rotten Tomatoes score for Season 5, the most recent installment at the time, is a resectable 84%. That explains why anticipation for Season 6, released in October 2011, was so high that October.

77.5% of all votes for Dexter that month were positive. Most of these votes came from Ranker’s list of The Best Of Premium Cable TV Series — more than 90% of the votes for Dexter on the list that month were upvotes. Voter sentiment on the Showtime series came close to this peak a few times over the next decade, but never quite as high as the month leading up to Season 6’s release.

Season 6 Kills The Buzz

That high point ended up being a tough height to fall from after Season 6, which disappointed critics and audiences alike — the season has a 40% Rotten Tomatoes score and is ranked 7 out of 8 on Ranker’s list of The Best Seasons Of Dexter (77K votes). Voter sentiment dropped steadily every month the season was on the air, going from 66.7% approval in October 2011 to 55% after the season finale in December. Two months after that finale, voter sentiment dropped well below the 50% line to 42.5%.

Season 7 Reverses the Trend

Nearly the exact reverse of the trend in Season 6 occurred in 2012 with the release of Season 7, which was considered a return to form by the fan base (the show is ranked #4 on our list of The Best Seasons Of Dexter). A steady upward trend between the month of Season 7’s premiere in September 2012 to the finale in December indicates just how effective it was in getting fans back on the bandwagon, bringing the show’s approval rating from 55.6% (around the same place it was when Season 6 ended) up to 68%. By January 2013, Dexter had nearly returned to its high point, peaking at 76.4%.

Series Finale Leaves a Bad Taste in Fans’ Mouths

But the good times couldn’t last. Dexter’s widely anticipated final season was seen by many fans as wildly disappointing, as evidenced by Season 8’s last-place spot on our Best Seasons Of Dexter list. The trend from Season 7 again reversed itself, with sentiment dropping quickly between Season 8’s premiere in June 2013 and the series finale in September of that year. Dexter’s approval among Ranker voters went from 65% to 56.5% during that period, and it fell beneath the 50% line in December. The season left a bad taste in viewers’ mouths, earning the show a #3 spot on Ranker’s list of Beloved TV Shows With Terrible Final Seasons (118K votes).

Low Point: June 2017

Years after an unpopular finale, Dexter hit a low point in terms of its approval rating among Ranker readers in June 2017. Most of the negative votes that month came from our list of The Best Shows Available On Netflix To Watch Now (1.7 million views), where 88% of the 635 votes for Dexter that month were downvotes. 

Dexter: New Blood Announced

The new miniseries is a light at the end of the tunnel for Dexter. After the new show was announced in October 2020, sentiment for Dexter hit 67.4%, its highest point since the show went off the air. With original showrunner Clyde Phillips onboard, fans have good reason to hope that Dexter: New Blood will bring a return to the series’ glory days. Time will tell how the show’s approval rating, which most recently sat at 57%, fares throughout its run.

Where Is Dexter’s Audience?

The return of an iconic series like Dexter is bound to attract viewers, but things in television have changed since the show went off the air in 2013. Far fewer people have cable subscriptions in the age of streaming, which means Showtime will have to convince many fans of Dexter to pony up for a subscription if they want New Blood to have anywhere near as big an impact as the original show. Where have the series’ fans wandered off to since the end of Season 8?

Ranker Insights data suggests that, like Dexter himself, fans of the show are creatures of habit. In the years since Dexter came to an end, fans have gravitated toward other shows that deal with the psychology of a serial killer: they’re 5X more likely than the average TV fan to love Mindhunter, 4X more likely to love the canceled Fox drama Prodigal Son, and 3X more likely to love the stalker thriller You from Netflix. But Insights can look deeper to see the TV tastes of smaller, more specific segments of Dexter’s audience.

Those who voted up Dexter on our list of TV Shows With The Best Writing (70K votes), fans who expect the kind of cerebral storylines that Clyde Phillips is known for, have TV preferences that go beyond the realm of serial killers. They’re 5X more likely to cite Fringe as one of the Greatest TV Shows Of All Time (1.5 million votes), and 4X more likely to vote up The Walking Dead on the same list. That said, they clearly have a taste for blood: voting on our list of Shows That Only Smart People Appreciate (1.1 million votes), these fans were 9X more likely to indicate that NBC’s Hannibal, the Silence of the Lambs prequel starring Mads Mikkelsen that premiered in 2013, complements their intellects.

Those who have stuck with Dexter since the first episode, voting for the show on our list of The All-Time Greatest Pilots (164K votes), are fans in particular of USA’s Mr. Robot: they’re 9X more likely to name it one of the Best TV Shows Of The Last 20 Years (1.5 million votes) and 8X more likely to name it one of the Greatest TV Shows Of All Time, period. Beyond that, their comedy tastes vary from the gleefully stupid to the cerebral — these fans are 5X more likely to vote up Comedy Central’s Tosh.0 and 3X more likely to vote up NBC’s cult favorite Community on our list of The Funniest TV Shows Of All Time (500K votes).

Finally, Insights can tell us information about the Dexter fans Showtime might have lost with its controversial final episodes. People who voted up Dexter on our list of Beloved TV Shows With Terrible Final Seasons (118K votes), for instance, are 2X more likely than the average viewer to say Rick and Morty is one of the Best TV Shows Of The Last 20 Years. Even more specifically, we can identify Dexter fans who hated the final episode of Dexter by looking at the behavior of those who upvoted the show on our list of the Worst TV Series Finales Ever (166K votes) — these fans are 3X more likely to cite The Blacklist and Arrested Development as two of the Best TV Shows To Binge Watch (1.3 million votes), and they’re 4X more likely to name Momento as one of the Best Movies Of All Time (6 million votes).

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.

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