Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dexter: Original Sin’ On Paramount+, About Dexter Morgan’s First Days With The MMPD — And His First Kills

Origin-story prequels of popular series are tricky, mainly because you’re handing familiar roles to new actors. Do you want them to do an impression of the original actor’s performance, foster their own version of the character, or both? That’s the question that Clyde Phillips and company needed to figure out while creating a series about Dexter Morgan’s first days at the MMPD.

DEXTER: ORIGINAL SIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A snow-covered police SUV speeding through a wooded area. A gravely injured Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) is in the back.

The Gist: As we hear Dexter’s usual inner voice describe this unprecedented encounter with death, the result of his son Harrison shooting him at his behest. However, when he gets to the ER, he’s revived. But his inner voice says, “It really is like they say; your life flashes before your eyes.” That’s when we see Dexter’s mother Doris (Jasper Lewis) give birth to him on February 1, 1971.

Then we flash forward 20 years, to 1991. Dexter (Patrick Gibson) is an exceptional student in his premed program at the University of Miami, on the path to med school and becoming a surgeon. This was part of the plan that he and his dad Harry (Christian Slater) made to satisfy Dexter’s increasing lust for blood. But Dexter is having doubts, especially after cutting into a cadaver did nothing for him.

At a the scene of a gruesome murder of an entire family, we’re introduced to Harry’s coworkers in the MMPD, where he’s a detective: His boss, Captain Aaron Spencer (Patrick Dempsey), detectives Bobby Watt (Reno Wilson) and Angel Batista (James Martinez), and forensic specialists Vince Masuka (Alex Shimizu) and Tanya Martin (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Harry finds it strange that the killer turned the TV off, and finds a bloody fingerprint on the remote, the only linkage to a killer. Dexter sees Vince at a campus career fair and immediately sees evidence in two of the the pictures on display that the same killer did both murders.

Harry encourages Dexter’s younger sister Debra (Molly Brown) to take him to a fraternity party she wants to go to. When she does, she gets rip-roaring drunk, and Dexter almost kills a guy who was going to take advantage of her. The next day, on a hunting trip to help the bloodlust, he tells Harry that he almost killed someone. Harry, ever under stress, has a heart attack.

At the hospital, Harry only gets worse. Deb thinks its his lifestyle, but Dexter can sense another sociopath in his midst, and he starts suspecting his dad’s nurse is slowly killing her patients, including Harry. This is when the “code” that he and Harry discussed over time kicked in: If he’s going to kill someone, it should be another killer. He just needs Harry’s go ahead to do it.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Dexter: Original Sin is a prequel of Dexter, of course; the original show’s Clyde Phillips created this new series. As we see in the cold open, it’s also a bridge between the recent miniseries Dexter: New Blood and the 2025 miniseries Dexter: Resurrection.

Our Take: It’s definitely important that Phillips, who was the primary creative force behind the original Dexter series, is in charge here, as well. This way, the show retains the same signature mix of humor, the creepiness of Dexter’s inner monologue, and overall bloodiness that the original had. But it’s also a risk to hand over characters that are so familiar to viewers, and have a particular chemistry with each other, to new, younger actors. That’s one of the big issues we have with Dexter: Original Sin.

Gibson isn’t supposed to play 20-year-old Dexter the same way as Hall’s more outgoing version. We get that aspect of the character; the Dexter that we encountered back in 2006 had 15 years to learn how to be gregarious and mask his sociopathy to the public. Young Dexter hasn’t learned that yet, and Gibson plays him that way. He’s a guy whose weirdness is a bit more overt, especially the aspect of his personality that seems to be unaffected by things that would make others more emotional.

But there are also times when it seems Gibson is trying to channel Hall, which is an impossible task. Hall embodied Dexter with a signature ability to switch his mordancy on and off, but that’s something that few actors can pull off. We’re not sure Gibson will be able to do it.

We also don’t quite see the chemistry between Gibson and Brown, who plays Deb, that Hall and Jennifer Carpenter, who played adult Deb, had in the original series. Again, that could be purposeful, as Deb was still unsure if Dexter had her back at this point in their lives, and their mother’s death was still relatively fresh.

What we did like was Slater as Harry, who has his own pain to deal with, and why he tries as much as he can to protect his kids and make sure they’re safe. We know what Slater is capable of, and he makes Harry a much more three-dimensional character than what we saw in the original.

We’re not completely sure about the rest of the cast. Can Martinez and Shimizu put their own spins on Batista and Masuka? The jury is still out on that one. We don’t see Christina Milian as the younger Maria LaGuerta in the first episode. Dempsey is… interesting as the blustery Capt. Spencer. Wilson and Gellar play characters new to the Dexter universe, and all we can count on is how reliable they’ve been in both of their long careers.

Perhaps once Dexter, who’s now a paid forensic intern with the MMPD, gets involved in cases of the week — as well as experiences more kills of his own — we’ll see things jell more. As introductory episodes go, though, Dexter: Original Sin has more than enough going for it to keep us watching.

Sex and Skin: Except the scene where Deb was about to get assaulted, there’s nothing.

Parting Shot: Dexter spins in his chair at his new desk in the forensics lab.

Sleeper Star: Sarah Michelle Gellar is considered a “special guest star”, but she’s in all of the episodes as Tanya Martin. We’ll be curious to see how she does as Dexter’s boss and mentor.

Most Pilot-y Line: The needle drops in the first episode scream “1991.” Phillips even found a way to insert “Ice Ice Baby” into the mix.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While we’re not convinced that Dexter: Original Sin will be as compelling as the early years of the original series, we’re hoping that the new cast develops their own chemistry instead of trying to imitate the dynamic of the original show’s cast.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.