‘Dexter’ Has Been Resurrected Again. He Has Company.

On a morning in mid-May, inside a trailer at the base of a Long Island hotel, Kat St. John, a set costumer, attacked a gray collared shirt with a spray bottle. The shirt was bloodstained. Between shooting days, the stains had dried.

“We have to add new blood,” she said as she sprayed.

This was on the set of “Dexter: Resurrection,” the newest iteration of the Showtime franchise surrounding Dexter Morgan, the vigilante serial killer played by Michael C. Hall. The original series debuted in 2006 and ended in 2013. A reprise, “Dexter: New Blood,” premiered in 2021. A prequel, “Dexter: Original Sin,” followed in 2024 and has since been renewed.

Though “New Blood” seemingly left Dexter bleeding out in the snow, “Resurrection,” which begins July 11 on Paramount+ with Showtime, returns Hall’s killer to TV. His survival is a miracle, but given television’s suffocating embrace of reboots, revivals, sequels, prequels and TV movies, also not really a surprise. This trend isn’t new: The New York Times’s James Poniewozik surveyed it back in 2018, arguing that with the expanding volume of TV, “it’s a battle for anything new to get attention.”

But while that proliferation has since slowed, with networks and streamers now releasing fewer scripted series than they did several years ago, brand extension mania has only intensified. Until fairly recently, franchises were the small screen purview of procedurals, unscripted series, “Star Trek” and the occasional Norman Lear sitcom. Now the impulse toward world building extends to even prestige or prestige-adjacent dramas.

It is easy enough to imagine a “Dexter” of past decades justifying a spinoff or a remake. But not three of them. And three isn’t even a lot anymore.