Les Moonves May Have Inadvertently Confirmed That ‘Dexter’ Will End After Season 8

Let’s say there’s this guy at work. We’ll call him Carl. Carl has been with the company for a long time. In fact, he was one of the people who helped really get it off the ground. He was a vital asset during those first few years, beloved by both clients and the corporate overlords, but lately he’s been slipping. He’s been showing up late, turning in sloppy work, making awkward passes at the interns, and, look, you didn’t hear this from me, but Sheila from accounting says she caught him sliding a half-empty bottle of vodka back into his desk after lunch last week.

There have been rumors for a while that Carl was getting the axe, but the managers in the office have been non-committal. For whatever reason, it seems clients still love him despite this drop-off in quality, and so letting him go has been trickier than everyone in the office hoped. “Maybe after the big holiday push,” the higher-ups said a few months back. “Or maybe after we train his replacement. We’ll see.” Meanwhile, Carl was passed out in his office, frying yet another company-issued laptop with the pool of drool dripping out of his mouth, and snoring loud enough for the whole office to hear.

But then one day someone from corporate came in to give a presentation titled “Exciting Developments: The Next 12 Months And You!,” and on the fourteenth slide of a twenty-five page Powerpoint, in block letters that came flying in from the top-left corner, it said “What do we do now that Carl’s gone?,” and everyone looked at each other like “Wait. Did he just say Carl’s gone?”

That’s kind of what happened yesterday during a conference call with CBS CEO Les Moonves, who also oversees Showtime (emphasis mine):

“We have Ray Donovan coming on with Liev Schreiber, which comes on with Dexter’s last season starting in June and then we have Masters of Sex,” Moonves replied with a laugh as if to acknowledge something that Showtime has yet to do.

Showtime executives have been mum on what the future holds for Dexter. A spokesperson for the network told The Hollywood Reporter late Monday that there was “nothing confirmed” about if the series could and would continue beyond season eight. [THR]

Hint: Carl was Dexter.