‘Dexter’ season 7 and ‘Homeland’ season 2 set highs (and a debate begins)
You see what happens when your ratings rise? Everyone makes a gigantic deal out of it, and you start to see questions about whether or not a few extra hundred thousand viewers will justify a lengthy salary negotiation.
Let’s look at the current situation involving “Dexter” first and foremost from the vantage point of facts. With 2.6 million viewers and 3.05 million on the night, the penultimate episode of the show’s seventh season was the highest-rated on record. (This record was previously help by the season 4 finale, which of course featured the curtain call for John Lithgow as Trinity and is considered by man to be the best thing created by the series to date.) Couple this with the series-high 2.36 million viewers watching “Homeland” at 10:00, Showtime had itself quite a night.
Here is where the problem lies for those anxious to start making proclamations right away that “Dexter” should reconsider its current plans to end the show after season 8. For one, we don’t really know if there were any more viewers who watched the show overall, or if some of the people who traditionally DVR decided to watch live this week now that “The Walking Dead” is not airing new episodes anymore. For Showtime, it’s not as enormous of a deal who is watching live given that they don’t have advertisers to worry about.
Meanwhile, there’s also an issue of salary. There have been no concrete figures released when it comes to how much Michael C. Hall makes for the show, but last year he signed a two-year contract that reportedly paid him somewhere between $10-12 million a season. If this is accurate, this is quite a lot for a network to spend on an actor and executive producer (close to $1 million an episode), and he would surely want more to do another year. Plus, you would also have to sign on the rest of the cast.
Our final conclusion for now? The “Dexter” ratings are great, but the last thing we want for a great show to feel old in the tooth (and it did at times last season). The writers have a plan for the end in place, so we’re better off letting them stick to it.
If you want to see some more scoop on the upcoming “Dexter” finale, you can do so over here.
Photo: Showtime
