Michael C. Hall insisted Showtime's Dexter: New Blood revival not be Season 9

Variety

At a Comic-Con@Home panel Sunday, Dexter's New Blood title was revealed, as well as the first trailer and Nov. 7 premiere date for the Showtime event series. Dexter won't pick up where Season 8 left off with Dexter Morgan as a lumber jack. Instead, New Blood will take place eight years after the series finale, like in real life. “One of the things that Michael insisted on, and he was completely right, was that this not be Dexter Season 9,” said Clyde Phillips, who returns as showrunner for the new series. “This not the next moment after the lumberjack moment. … We pick up with Dexter in another place, in another world, actually, as far away from Miami as possible.” Meanwhile, Hall reiterated that "a huge part" of him wanting to do the revival was because of the disappointing series finale. “I think the ending was mystifying, at best, to people — confounding, exasperating, frustrating, on down the line of negative adjectives,” he said. “And I think this is a show that’s very important to all of us and the chance to revisit it and maybe in the process redefine the sense of the show’s ending and the sense of the show’s legacy more broadly was certainly a part of our motivation.” The panel also offered details of new cast member Julia Jones, who plays the first Native American Chief of Police in the upstate New York town and who is romantically involved with Dexter Morgan. “She’s dynamic and she has a lot to overcome,” Jones said. As for Dexter's mindset at the beginning of New Blood, Hall said: “Dexter is exercising the power of his restraint. His ability to not do it is something he fixates on as something as a new kind of power. It’s the only way I can imagine him living with killing — if, in fact, he hasn’t been killing.”