Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 Opens at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, Below Season 1

Dexter: Resurrection returned to Paramount+ with Showtime on Friday 30 October 2026 with an 86% Tomatometer from seven reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metascore of 75 from five critics on Metacritic. Season 1 finished at 95% from 64 reviews, so the drop is nine points. The size of the sample matters as much as the size of the gap.

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Critics were given the first two episodes ahead of reviews on 28 October. That is enough to judge a premiere and a second hour, not a 10-episode season that runs into January. Most of the early reviews treat the season as a promising start with clear reservations. The argument inside those reviews is about whether the New York reset and the aging-Dexter premise add up, and two episodes cannot answer that.

What the two scores measure

The Rotten Tomatoes figure is an approval rate, not an average grade. Seven reviews, six of them positive, produce 86%. Add one more positive review and the number rises; flip one of the seven from positive to negative and it falls to 71%. At 64 reviews, as Season 1 had, a single review moves the score by about 1.6 points. The same arithmetic explains why the Season 2 number should be read as an early reading rather than a settled verdict.

Metacritic works differently: it converts each review to a normalized score out of 100, then averages them. Its 75 comes from five reviews, with four positive and one mixed, according to the season page. The individual inputs are 90 for Screen Rant, 80 for RogerEbert.com, 80 for Collider, 70 for IGN and 50 for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Forbes reported that most Rotten Tomatoes critics had embraced the season even with the lower score. That framing is accurate as far as it goes: four of the five scored reviews are positive. It does not make the season a success, and it does not make the negative review an outlier to be discounted.

Five reviews, from 90 to 50

Screen Rant’s Sean Morrison is the most enthusiastic, at 90 on Metacritic. He calls the first two episodes “just as thrilling as the first season” and argues that Dexter’s age gives the story a natural next step. His review also names the problem the season is built around: Dexter is up against “the one enemy he can’t put on his table: time.”

RogerEbert.com’s Brian Tallerico sits at 80 on Metacritic. His review says the underwriting of Blessing and Harrison never lingers long enough to drag the show into “the dismal morass of late Dexter seasons,” because so much else works. He also notes that only two episodes were sent to press.

Collider’s Tania Hussain also sits at 80 on Metacritic. Her review says the season is off to a promising start, with intriguing storylines across the first two episodes, and that there are “some growing pains, but the series finds its footing fast.”

IGN’s Matt Fowler reviewed only the premiere and scored it 7/10. He calls “Risky Business” a “fun, twisty start” and then attaches a condition: the season works if Dexter’s “I’m over 50 now” restlessness is handled differently from his earlier bouts of self-reflection.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Bob Strauss is the negative, at 50 on Metacritic. He finds the murders routine, the humor close to self-parody and the new characters less interesting than the old ones. His review also concedes that only two episodes were available, that much is set in motion, and that Michael C. Hall “is still watchable.”

All five reviews treat Hall as watchable at minimum, and none argues that he has lost the role. The disagreement is about the material around him.

Where the reviews divide

The positive reviews and the negative one describe the same show. Dexter is over 50, living in New York, trying to be a father to a son who has just joined the NYPD, and hunting two killers with different methods. One is the older New York Ripper, played by Brian Cox. The other is the Five Borough Killer, a young and mysterious predator played by Dan Stevens.

Screen Rant reads that setup as a character study with a built-in clock. Collider reads it as a midlife crisis that gives Hall funnier, sharper material. RogerEbert.com reads it as a richer counterpoint than the show has had in years, with Brian Cox’s Ripper flaunting what Dexter has always hidden.

The Chronicle reads the same ingredients as reheated. If the murders feel rote and the new arrivals do not intrigue, then the premise is not doing the work the other critics say it does. That is a judgment about execution, but it is also a judgment about whether this particular reset was necessary.

“Dexter: Resurrection season 2 is devilishly delightful and could easily be the best season of Dexter that we’ve gotten in years.” — Sean Morrison, Screen Rant, 28 October 2026

Both readings are defensible from two episodes. The premiere has to close out Season 1, introduce two antagonists, re-establish Harrison and the New York police, and bring back Charley. A second episode has to make all of that feel like a season rather than a checklist. The positive reviews say it starts to; the negative one says it does not.

A franchise on its fourth series

Dexter has been on television, in one form or another, for two decades. The original series ran on Showtime from 2006 to 2013 for eight seasons. Dexter: New Blood followed in 2021 as a one-season revival, and Dexter: Original Sin ran as a prequel in 2024 and 2025. Resurrection began in July 2025 and is the fourth series in the franchise, as Screen Rant notes in its review.

The first season of Resurrection was a surprise. It scored 95% from 64 reviews, and Rotten Tomatoes’ critics consensus described it as “a knowingly absurd continuation that rediscovers the thrill of the hunt.” That is a high bar for a second season, and a different kind of bar from the one the original show faced. Resurrection arrived after two endings, one widely disliked and one that served as a revised ending, and it worked by treating the absurdity as an asset.

Season 2 has to do that again without the element of surprise. The franchise moved Dexter from Miami and the small-town setting of New Blood to New York in Season 1, and Season 2 stays there. It adds Dan Stevens and Brian Cox as antagonists and brings back Uma Thurman as Charley. Clyde Phillips is showrunner and executive producer, and Michael C. Hall is an executive producer as well as the lead.

A 95% first season buys goodwill and raises expectations. It also means the second season is being reviewed against a version of the show that critics had already decided was a return to form. RogerEbert.com’s review refers to “the dismal morass of late Dexter seasons” as the thing this revival is not. That is the standard the show is now measured against.

Why the weekly rollout matters

Paramount+ with Showtime is releasing the 10 episodes weekly, not all at once. Episode 1, “Risky Business,” arrived on 30 October. Episode 2 follows on 6 November, and the finale is scheduled for 1 January 2027, according to the published schedule.

That choice shapes the reception. A binge release would compress the critical conversation into a single weekend, and the aggregate score would land before most viewers had formed an opinion. A weekly release stretches the same conversation across 10 weeks, with a new episode every Friday and a fresh round of reviews and reactions each time. The 86% is not the season’s final grade. It is the grade for the first two episodes, and it will be revised as the season goes.

The rollout also keeps the show in the weekly conversation for longer than a weekend. Paramount+ with Showtime gets a weekly franchise slot through the holidays, and the finale lands on New Year’s Day, when attention is elsewhere but the show is still running. Whether that helps the season commercially is not something the early reviews can establish.

What the schedule does establish is that the first verdict is provisional by design. Weekly reviews, weekly scores and weekly arguments are the format. The score will move as more reviews arrive.

Caveats

• The sample is small. 86% comes from seven reviews and 75 from five. Rotten Tomatoes’ own page listed fewer than 50 audience ratings at the time of writing, so there is no meaningful audience verdict yet.
• The comparison is not like for like. Season 1’s 95% came from 64 reviews. A seven-review sample and a 64-review sample do not carry the same weight.
• Critics saw two episodes. IGN reviewed only the premiere. The remaining eight episodes, including the finale, were not screened for press.
• One review is not a consensus. The 50 from the San Francisco Chronicle and the 90 from Screen Rant are single judgments. Neither speaks for the other critics, and neither settles the season.
• The premiere date is 30 October 2026. Paramount+, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic all list that date, though some databases may show a different one.

What to watch

The next data point is the second episode on 6 November, followed by the review count. If the Tomatometer holds near 86% as more reviews arrive, the season has a stable critical majority. If it drifts toward the 70s, the Chronicle’s reading will look more representative than the early positive ones.

The audience score is the other number worth watching, though it will not mean much for another week or two. A weekly release builds that slowly. The first meaningful reading will come after several episodes have aired, not after the premiere weekend.

For now, the early reception is a majority-positive start with a clear dissent. Nine episodes remain, and the reviews for them will decide whether the score holds.

Cover: Dan Stevens as Lucas Stark in Dexter: Resurrection Season 2, courtesy of Paramount+ with Showtime, via ScreenRant, cropped 16:9.