Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Will Trent Is Great At Making The Pieces Fit Together - And Rocking A Three-Piece

 

 

Last summer in my review of AMC’s Dark Winds, I mentioned my general dismay that far too many mystery series on TV have origins in British mystery novels when there are just as many great American mysteries worthy of adaptation. I had not yet heard of ABC’s planned adaptation of Karen Slaughter’s Will Trent bestsellers, and since I had not heard of the novels at all, I’m not certain it would have meant anything. Now I’ve seen the first three episodes of Will Trent, and I really want to read anyone of Slaughter’s novels which is the benchmark of any great literary adaptation. It helps that Will Trent is looking more and more like it might be the first great new show of 2023.

Will Trent is one of the more distinctive law enforcement agents we’ve met on television in an awfully long time, and for a change it’s not just because he’s a brilliant detective with a prickly personality. For one, there’s the three-piece suit, complete with a handkerchief that is mocked by basically every other law enforcement agent around him. Trent has also just come off a massive corruption investigation in the Atlanta PD that has basically made him the enemy of everybody in that department and quite a few other people – when we see car, there is some very suggestive graffiti on it. One of the people who has complete faith in him is his superior who we only know as Amanda (Sonja Sohn is back with a badge and she’s still a total badass!) who knows how good an investigator he is and how badly he works with others, something he seems proud of when we first see him walk through a murder scene in the pilot which he very quickly realizes is a kidnapping.

This does not make people more inclined to like him, or even work with him. His current partner is Faith (Ianthe Richardson) who is the complete opposite of Trent. Her car is a complete and utter mess that is practically held together with glue and whom she fundamentally resents any attempt to fix. Because she’s an African-American woman, she has a reason to be mad and resentful and to be honest, Trent goes out of his way to inspire those exact emotions in anybody.

That said, Trent has a particularly good excuse. He was raised in foster care and was rescued from a very abusive situation that has scarred him both emotionally and physically. (We actually see the evidence of that in the pilot.) He has a severe case of dyslexia that has rendered him ‘functionally illiterate,’ something only Amanda is aware of. The cassette recorder he uses to collect his thoughts at a crime scene aren’t only a plot device to put us in the head of how Trent reasons; he needs in order to function and do his job. He is also fundamentally aware of things utter people would miss (“I’m a pretty observant guy,” he tells us in the second episode) and it’s no doubt part of how he had to pick up on signs to read things.

But for all his abrasive behavior, the audience never loathes or even dislikes Trent the way we were inclined to hate so many of the TV sleuths at the center of so many network procedurals. A lot of that is because of how Ramon Rodriguez plays him in the title role. He is abrasive and insensitive, but you are always aware fundamentally of his soft spot. We get this in our first meeting with him when he’s trying to convince a shelter to take in a stray dog that he doesn’t have any use for – until he learns the shelter puts animals to sleep if they aren’t rescued. Then he automatically adopts Betty and openly shows warmth and compassion for her, such as in last night’s episode when he was clearly nervous about going on the road and leaving her alone at the first time. Trent is capable of sensitivity both to the families of the victims and some of the people he investigates. He is very capable of trying to find a way out and negotiate and is very reluctant to pull a gun. This happens even when some of those people are inclined to dislike him. In the first two episodes, the father of the kidnap victim was another member of his foster home (I actually hope we see Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s character again) The father did everything in his power to demean Trent, lied to him throughout the investigation and then showed up on his doorstep having shot the suspected kidnapper. But even though they were aggressive, Trent was sympathetic all the way through because he understood his situation, even before the kidnapping.

This gets me to what may be the best part of the show -  Erika Christensen’s Angie Pulaski. Angie grew up in the same foster home as Will, and for twenty-five years, they’ve been having an on-and-off affair. Angie comes from an even worse situation than Will does – as we learned in the second episode, her mother began pimping her out when she was five years old, she has addictions to alcohol and drugs, and they have led her to make bad decisions throughout every aspect of her life. She is now a detective with the Atlanta PD, is currently a member of AA, and in the pilot is transferred to Homicide with a detective she had a one-night stand with when both of them were high. She has spent her career trying to pretend it didn’t happen, something that was not helped one bit when the detective’s wife invited her to dinner for the sole purpose of telling her she knew about the affair and that she thought Pulaski was a monster.

Christensen has been one of my favorite actresses for more than twenty years, appearing in such marvelous films as Traffic and The Upside of Anger, and her wonderful work as Julia Braverman, the workaholic daughter of Parenthood. She’s appeared in some interesting failed series since then, but this is her great role in a long time. She’s clearly a good detective and she knows how to do her job. And from the moment she calls Will in the middle of a vice bust to help him with the kidnapping case in the Pilot, we know that these two characters are soulmates – the fact that she shows up at her house at the end of the episode just confirms it. Angie knows they bring out the worst in each other, but that doesn’t mean they’re not meant for each other. There’s a genuine chemistry between them that makes the sex scenes between them steamy in a way network shows aren’t and there’s a compassion in them their behavior around each other that it is tooled in respect and shared pain. We know that if this series goes on long enough the two of them will stop fighting the inevitable end up together, but it doesn’t matter because we want them too from the beginning.

I haven’t mentioned many of the actual cases so far, but I have to see the investigations themselves have been interesting in their own right. Last night’s case, where Will and Faith went to a small town in Georgia to investigate the shooting and burning of the mayor of the town was a searing indictment of racism and long old crimes and ultimately a heartbreaking story of just how those crimes can leave marks that never go away. A lesser series would have dragged out the story for weeks; Will Trent dealt with in an episode, and that made it all the more powerful – and painful.

It remains to be seen if Will Trent can become a long-term success for ABC, the way series like The Rookie have or whether it will die on the vine, like far too many potentially great ABC series have. But Will Trent is clearly a sign that ABC is quickly assuming a place among the networks as willing to take the biggest risks with the most reward. It has paid off with Abbott Elementary and The Wonder Years (Season 2 is coming, right?) and it has worked quite a bit with dramas such as Big Sky and the soon to exit Million Little Things. Will Trent is another piece of this, and it deserves to enjoy the same success that those gambles have brought the network.

My score: 4.5 stars.

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