Dexter: New Blood Confirms His Son Harrison Will Return

It's been confirmed that the next season of Dexter, entitled Dexter: New Blood will be bringing back Dexter Morgan's son, Harrison - something the showrunners previously teased. Harrison will now be a teenage boy in the updated timeline of the series and will be played by Jack Alcott (The Blacklist, The Good Lord Bird). During the TCA press tour this week, Dexter: New Blood showrunner Clyde Phillips stated that "you can't do a show about 'Dexter' without including the theme of fathers and sons." Phillips went on to set up how Harrison Morgan will return in New Blood, saying, "His son has always thought he was dead and then found out he was alive and has a great resentment."

With that framework in place, Phillips makes it clear that one subplot of Dexter: New Blood will see the serial killer vigilante having to make up some serious ground when it comes to fatherhood: "[Dexter] has a lot of work to do to win his son back and prove that he's a good father."

Dexter: New Blood executive producer Scott Reynolds made it clear that fans shouldn't expect to see the same kind of A-B-C storylines that we used to get in the old series. This new installment is actually going to make the focus much more intimate and personal for Dexter:

"We... broke the format of what we were doing before... Big Bad and smaller bads … We find, stalk and hunt and wrap them in plastic and kill them — like eight to 10 bad guys each season," Reynolds said of how Dexter used to things. However, with New Blood "we stepped away from that a little bit and made it much more personal. It's about Harrison. It's about family life. It's about a father who is a murderer — a serial killer — and the effect that that has on everybody around him."

There is a certain amount of truth to what Scott Reynolds points out about the previous Dexter series. The show was propelled on the cat-and-mouse chase of Dexter staying one step ahead of police buddies - but more importantly, those close to him like his sister Deb. Dexter essentially spent much of its run side-stepping the emotional fallout of how Dexter's actions affected the ones around him - now it sounds like Dexter: New Blood will be going deep into that very subject.

Last we saw Harrison Morgan, he was in the care of Hannah McKay, Dexter's serial killer girlfriend. Hannah and Harrison made it to Argentina together, only for Hannah to learn of Dexter's disappearance and presumed demise. However, not everything was 'happily ever after' for Hannah: after all, private detective Jacob Elway still know that Hannah was at large with Harrison in her care.

During a Comic-Con @ Home panel. Dexter star Michael C. Hall admitted that bad response to the series finale prompted the revival: "It was a huge part of it. I think the ending was mystifying at best to people, confounding, exasperating, frustrating, on down the line of negative adjectives. 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. No doubt."

Dexter: New Blood premieres on Showtime beginning November 7th and can be watched live or on the Showtime app.