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I sat down with Colleton, who’s been an executive producer on the show since day one, and she told me about how Dexter came to be. In 2004, she read a New York Times book review of Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay — the book that would go on to inspire the Showtime series as well as six other books by Lindsay.

“For the very first time ever in my life, I read a book and it appeared to me as a television series,” she told me. Colleton still has that torn-out book review saved in her home in New York City.

Now that the final season of Dexter is set to premiere on Sunday, June 30, I wanted to get Colleton’s take on the last seven years of working on the show. She gave me the inside scoop on the cast romances, Michael's cancer diagnosis, and what's to come in the final season.