Dexter: New Blood is a sequel to Showtime's long-running series Dexter, which began in 2006 as an adaptation of Jeff Lindsay's novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter before developing its own storyline from the second season onward.
The series centers on Dexter Morgan, who, as a child, witnessed his mother's brutal murder by chainsaw. This trauma turned him into a sociopath with a compulsion to kill, which he calls the Dark Passenger. His adoptive father, Harry Morgan, trains Dexter to channel this compulsion by becoming a vigilante who targets criminals who have evaded justice.
While the series starts off with Dexter living a stable double life thanks to the Code of Harry, by the end of the original run, Dexter had fled Miami on a boat and started a new life as an anonymous lumberjack.
Dexter: New Blood begins almost a decade after the conclusion of the original series, and is set in the fictional town of Iron Lake, New York. Filming was primarily done in Shelbourne Falls, Massachusetts, to convey the aesthetic of a snow-ridden remote town.
Dexter: New Blood was filmed in Massachusetts
Shelbourne Falls is a village located in western Massachusetts, which is where the majority of filming for Dexter: New Blood took place. During 2021's San Diego Comic Con, returning showrunner Clyde Phillips spoke about the filming to Polygon—
"We started shooting at the beginning of February because we needed a lot of snow, and we took advantage of that."
Phillips continued—
"That frozen lake [from the first teaser] is a real frozen lake. That’s a single shot that Marcos did in real time. And we wanted it to be a small town—and population is something like 2,700—where everybody knows everybody else. People know things that happened two seconds ago."
Marcos Siega was the director of six of the ten episodes, and he elaborated on the challenges of filming for the show. Per Polygon, Siega said—
"We had to build the schedule around [weather]. Shoot all of the winter scenes, exteriors, at the end of January, February, March, whenever we started, And then work our way to interiors."
Executive producer Scott Reynolds considered the filming experience to be an incredibly intense 50 days of production, which Siega agreed with.
Dexter: New Blood was more than just a season 9
When speaking about the show, Clyde Phillips made it clear that he considered Dexter: New Blood to be different. The sequel series was conceived in part due to the controversial reception of the original series finale.
Both Clyde Phillips and lead actor Michael C. Hall acknowledged the frustrations fans had with the original series ending, and wanted to give Dexter: New Blood an impactful conclusion that Dexter's story deserved.
During San Diego Comic Con, Clyde Phillips revealed that the show was developed by working backward from the ending, and he promised the conclusion of the series would "blow up the internet".
Dexter: New Blood is available on streaming on Paramount Plus.
Read More: Dexter: Original Sin — Everything we know so far