Clyde Phillips:
"I lived with the people on the show for four years that were the high point of my career. But I was missing out on my family. I need to be part of my own life, immerse into my own life."Robert Greenblatt, Showtime Entertainment President:
"Clyde Phillips has made an enormous contribution to the phenomenal success of Dexter for the past four years, but we know he needs to spend more time with his family on the East Coast than he spends with the Dexter family in L.A. We reluctantly say goodbye to him at a turning point in the series, but fellow Dexter executive producers Sara Colleton and John Goldwyn have chosen a great successor -- Chip Johannessen, who has been a key producer of 24 for the past two years. We're confident that he will bring intelligence, emotion and great storytelling to the next chapter of Dexter."And this is where I get worried. See, I don't really rate Chip Johannessen. He took over Millennium in its third season and gave fans a horribly tepid X-Files clone that got cancelled by Fox. His subsequent credits as a consulting producer include odious sci-fi actioner Dark Angel (two seasons, cancelled) and watery sci-fi Surface (one season, cancelled), before he took over as exec-producer on vampire drama Moonlight (half a season, cancelled).
More recently he worked as a consulting producer on 24's seventh season, which is about the only credit I can't grumble about -- but I'm not convinced his role as a consulting producer was that instrumental to its success. I guess Johannessen's impressed enough of the right people to land the juicy Dexter showrunner gig (just as the show got record-breaking ratings for Showtime) so I wish him luck. It'll be his biggest challenge yet, and I guess having worked on Millennium gives him some familiarity with serial-killers... but still, I can't help feeling very anxious about Dexter's future now. I just hope his influence on the existing writing staff is positive and fresh... but I also hope Showtime don't get greedy in the face of bumper ratings and announce an end-date for the show.
