DEXTER at TCA 2012 Live-Blog

The cast and producers of DEXTER will soon be taking the stage at the Television Critics Association, and I’ll be live-blogging the panel starting at 3:10 PM PT/6:10 PM ET.

[Note: Many reporters have seen the season 7 premiere and it is spoilerific, so it’s possible some of this will be a little more vague than past live-blogs if the panel goes into specifics about that hour.]

3:12 PM: We’re seeing a sizzle reel for the new season. It’s massively spoilery, but some major stuff is going down this year.

3:15 PM: “I have been looking forward to it and very curious about how they’d write [Deb finding out the truth],” Jennifer Carpenter (Deb) said.

“I think her finding out makes the endgame a little more palpable,” Michael C. Hall says. He calls it invigorating to have this shift in his character’s dynamic, because Dexter’s preoccupied in a way he has never been before.

3:17 PM: Carpenter says that when she auditioned, she dropped her pages and cursed. She jokes that she thinks it helped land her the part.

3:19 PM: Scott Buck calls the online guess about the Edward James Olmos twist a bit “frustrating,” but there was nothing they could do. He says if they were to do something like that again, they may do things differently.

3:20 PM: Who does Yvonne Strahovski play? She says she’s Hannah McKay, who comes into the story in episode 3. “It’s safe to say that Hannah McKay has a dark past as the episodes go on and she holds some secrets,” Strahovski says.

3:22 PM: “Each season I’ve become a better athlete,” Carpenter says of which season she’s felt strongest in.

“The first one is unique because we shot it before anyone had seen it,” Hall adds. “I think the fourth season is one a lot of people remember as being strong and I think it’s one where Dexter’s primary adversary was as [strong] as any he had faced.”

But Hall praises what they’re doing this season, too. “There’s a feeling of arrival, that we’ve earned this arrival and this new landscape.” Carpenter adds that it feels “dangerous.”

3:25 PM: “I would never say never, but I think the sense is we’re moving towards a definitive end,” Hall says of the possibility of continuing past next season.

3:26 PM: “I would think it’s ironic given my day job,” Hall jokes when someone asks what he’d do if he found out his (non-existent) sibling was a serial killer.

3:27 PM: “It’s very gratifying,” EP Sara Colleton of people wanting to be on the show, some of who don’t normally do television.

3:29 PM: “I’ve never had a better scene partner than Jennifer,” Hall says of what he admires about his costar. “Her generosity and volatility of her performance, the sense of danger to the dynamic, the sense of commitment…I’m astonished watching her.”

“Michael sets the tone” for how the entire show operates, Carpenter says. She notes he keeps everyone in communication and takes care of the details. She points to how he swipes his watch and taps it before kills. (Now I’m going to need to go back and rewatch those scenes.)

3:33 PM: “We took the book and the origin story and the really brilliant idea Jeff Lindsay had of the conceit of Dexter’s character,” Colleton says. But she feels like it would be cheating to use it now since they’ve deviated so far. So if you’re looking to see how Deb will react to Dexter’s secret, there likely won’t be spoilers in those.

3:35 PM: Buck says they always knew they’d tell the story of Deb finding out, but they didn’t want to do it before they had an end in (quasi-)sight.

3:38 PM: “It’s all intimidating, but it’s exhilarating,” Strahovski says of her new show. She calls it a privilege to be guesting and calls it an “honor” to be a part of it.

3:40 PM: “For my money, DEXTER is never more compelling than when he is in trouble,” Hall says of what fans can look forward to this year if they didn’t like last season. “And he has never really been in deeper trouble than he is now.”

3:42 PM: “Because I know what we’re doing this year, I’m really excited about showing you what we’ve done,” Carpenter says, noting that questioning the quality of the series might have hurt her feelings had they not shot anything yet. But she’s excited for what we have yet to see.

3:43 PM: “It was very hard,” Carpenter says of shooting this scene.

3:46 PM: We just take it one year at a time,” Colleton says of DEXTER lasting this many years on Showtime.

3:47 PM: They haven’t officially broken story ideas for season 8, but they have given next year some thought.

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