If you’ve ever watched a movie or television show about a compulsive gambler, there’s a scene that’s sure to be familiar. Against all odds, our troubled protagonist has braved his addiction and won enough money to repay the mob, reopen the shuttered rec center or buy back the wedding ring that he pawned despite it being the only thing connecting him to his dead spouse. It’s a triumph that briefly conquers our hero’s inner demons, until the antagonist looks at him and says, “Double or nothing?” And we, as viewers, yell at the screen, “Stop! You did something dumb, but you came out on top! STOP!” In that brief moment of hope, we forget that we’re dealing with an addict.

This is the point that Dexter reached at the end of Dexter: New Blood.

The 10-episode return of Miami’s favorite droll serial killer, which ran from 2021 to 2022, existed for only one good reason: The ending of Dexter, nearly a decade earlier, stunk. Dexter: New Blood afforded creator Clyde Phillips and several of the series producers who hadn’t been involved in that conclusion to give the Emmy-winning series a more satisfying resting spot than Lumberjack Dexter.

And it worked! Not perfectly, mind you. Dexter: New Blood was rushed and derivative, not just of peak Dexter, but of the myriad imitators spawned by peak Dexter. But if the newer series couldn’t prove that the franchise still had ample creative gas in its tank, it showed that there was exactly enough fuel for this unwieldy vehicle to coast to a safer resting spot. Resolving with Dexter Morgan seemingly dead in the snow of upstate New York, killed by a son who decided he wasn’t prepared to follow in dad’s bloody footsteps, was a series-appropriate blend of sincere and ironic, tracing a demonstrable path from pilot to newfound finale that fans had worried was lost.

Consider Dexter: Resurrection, premiering on Paramount+ with Showtime or whatever it’s going to be called by the time you read this, to be Phillips’ double-or-nothing gamble on the franchise to which he has devoted so much of his professional life. If Dexter: New Blood was a series driven by “need” imperatives, reflected with a layer of tonal solemnity, Dexter: Resurrection comes only with “want” desires, reflected with an overall sense of frivolity. The thing was broken. Phillips and company largely fixed it. And now?

Through the four episodes sent to critics, all indications are that this is a lark of a season, like they’re playing with house money and not gambling on the tenuous dignity that they previously restored. Subtitle aside, Dexter: Resurrection feels like season 10 of Dexter (the prequel series might as well not exist), almost relentlessly obsessed with callbacks and Easter eggs and wholly stuck in the same rut of surging silliness that so frequently plagued the show after its consensus pinnacle in the John Lithgow-led fourth season. All of the grounding and clarity of purpose that carried Dexter: New Blood is gone, but if the version of Dexter that you enjoy was already borderline cartoonish — and the show is, and always has been, a dark comedy at heart — there’s entertainment to be found here.

We start 10 weeks after Harrison (Jack Alcott) left his father for dead. Dexter (Michael C. Hall), as I think the season’s title allows me to spoil, is not dead. He isn’t even under arrest, for reasons that have to be explained, if not justified.

Harrison, convinced that he’s rebuilding his life after committing patricide, has started over at an upscale Manhattan hotel, where he’s doing odd jobs for the snooty clientele and building a friendship with single-mom maid Elsa (Emilia Suárez). (It’s a missed opportunity that Harrison’s hospitality experience doesn’t intersect with that of Homeland demi-heroine Dana Brody.) Very early on, Harrison does something that suggests he may, indeed, be his father’s son, even if Dexter: New Blood was dedicated to convincing us that this was not the case. Whatever.

Soon, the arrival of an old friend and familiar jeopardy force Dexter to head down to New York City himself, presumably seeking Harrison. Accompanied by the insufferably moralizing spirit of his own dead dad (James Remar’s Harry, whom the series probably needs to learn to move beyond), Dexter befriends a jovial immigrant rideshare driver (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine’s Blessing), who tells him about a serial killer preying on local drivers. The press has given the killer a nickname reflecting his vicious methodology: “The Dark Passenger.”

Dexter is not amused.

You’d think there would be a satirical purpose in Dexter, as a red state tourist, arriving in New York City and finding it awash in serial killers, but there really isn’t. In terms of characterization, taking Manhattan does less to advance Dexter Morgan as a character than it did for Jason Voorhees. After the dramatic shift from the pastels and visual warmth of Miami to the washed out chill of upstate New York, the Dexter: Resurrection directors (Marcos Siega and Monica Raymund for the episodes I’ve seen) haven’t quite landed on an aesthetic in this gritty, urban setting.

What this uprooting does accomplish is refresh the ensemble of law enforcement figures Dexter must expertly dupe, a major advantage considering how stupid the entire Miami police department looked after eight years of proximity to Dexter’s genius. David Zayas’ Angel returns with his trademark hats and suspiciousness — he also delivers Dexter a cold Cubano sandwich, which is somehow the least believable thing in the season thus far — but at least there’s a slightly different energy provided by Dominic Fumusa and Kadia Saraf as a pair of NYPD detectives poking around Harrison and his hotel. Alcott continues to be good and he continues to bring the franchise a different energy, but I’m still not sure it’s distinctive enough to carry half of this story.

At this point, what Hall is doing as Dexter has ceased to be all that interesting. Or perhaps put more accurately, what the scripts are asking Hall to do as Dexter has ceased to be all that interesting. Practically every Dexter season has played variations on “Dexter builds a new relationship that causes him to examine whether or not he’s capable of love” or “Dexter makes a vicious pal, thinks they’re simpatico and learns a difficult lesson about how he’s different.” It makes sense for Dexter to grow and backslide as a character — he is, like the show itself, an addict and a gambler — but Hall seems to have lost new shadings to play.

Because those are the two most common Dexter narrative tropes, each new season has forced the writers to develop escalating versions, each inherently more heightened and less plausible than the last. It’s a process of creative desensitization. It used to be enough for Dexter to meet somebody who killed one person. And then for him to meet somebody who was a budding serial killer. And then to meet somebody who was every bit as prolific as Dexter. Now, finally, we’ve reached the “Oops, All Serial Killers” season of Dexter, in which he encounters a full-on convoy of murderers, played with fitting wackiness by the likes of Neil Patrick Harris, David Dastmalchian, Krysten Ritter and more.

I won’t spoil the context for this retinue of psychopaths, only to say that Ritter comes the closest to giving a dimensionalized performance. As two additional figures with questionable impulse control who take an interest in Dexter, Peter Dinklage and Uma Thurman chew scenery with aplomb, but like nearly everybody else this season, they’re closer to the characters played by Edward James Olmos and Charlotte Rampling on the lesser side of Dexter’s rogue’s gallery than to the upper tier of Dexter adversaries. It becomes a question of whether viewers are looking for nuance (absent) or zaniness (abundant). Volume over quality.

A quick mention of Mwine, as warm and exuberant here as he is unnervingly withdrawn in Apple TV+’s Smoke. With Hulu’s Washington Black still to come, this is shaping up as the Summer of Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine. Let it be said that a TV show genuinely focused on an immigrant stuck in New York City’s gig economy hamster wheel as he and his friends are targeted by a serial killer would be a better show than Dexter: Resurrection. Probably.

It remains to be seen what, exactly, Dexter: Resurrection is building into. With none of the impending finality that Dexter: New Blood promised, is it setting up an ongoing NYC version of the show or opening the show up to annual globetrotting relocations (and perhaps recapturing the the terrain that was usurped by Lifetime and Netflix’s You)? Or is it just another gamble from a show that couldn’t quit while it was ahead?