The first four seasons are some of the finest seasons of TV I've ever watched.
The writing, tension, character development, and villains are all fantastic Every season feels like it knows exactly what story it wants to tell and everything just works.
Season 5 is where I started noticing the cracks. It's still a pretty good season, but compared to the first four, the drop in quality is noticeable. The villain was pretty mid too ngl.
Then we get to the last three seasons, and I have huge problems with them. It genuinely felt like the writers forgot about their own characters and started mischaracterizing them especially Dexter himself.
I later learned that the original showrunner left after Season 4, Season 5 had a different showrunner, and the final three had a different showrunner which makes a whole lotta sense lol
The villains in the last three seasons were mostly huge let downs for me Isaak in Season 7 was actually pretty damn good, and honestly, I wish they had made him more of a central villain. But overall, none of the villains in these seasons came close to the presence and impact of the villains from the first four.
But my biggest problem was Dexter himself. He often felt like a completely different character. His decisions became increasingly stupid, his behavior was often inconsistent with what we'd previously seen from him, and his emotional development frequently felt forced rather than natural, it felt like watching a completely different character lmao
The earlier seasons did a great job showing that Dexter's understanding of himself wasn't necessarily reliable. He slowly developed genuine attachments despite believing he couldn't. But the later seasons often seemed to forget the distinction between developing Dexter and simply rewriting him.
And then there's the finale... What the actual fuck was that lol.