Will Trent Is Back For Season 2

 

 

During 2023 I quickly became a huge fan of ABC’s Will Trent, arguably the best network drama in all of 2023 and a series that very quickly has the potential to become one of the best new dramas as Peak TV enters its next phase. Over the last several months, various awards shows (if not the Emmys) have been more than willing to give the show its due. Ramon Rodriguez was nominated for Best Actor by the Critics Choice Awards this December and Rodriguez received a corresponding nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards. The show itself was among the most nominated network series in the HCA TV (now Astra awards) in the summer of 2023, receiving eight nominations. It deservedly took the Best Network Drama prize in January. I’ve been waiting for a lot of series to return after the strikes in Hollywood spent five months delaying things but there are few dramas I’ve been anticipating more. Finally last week Season 2 began, and while it wasn’t worth the wait (because of the reason we had to wait) it has not disappointed one bit.

Before we get into what has happened in the two part series premiere, I think its worth doing not only a review of what happened last season but the differences between the series and the Karin Slaughter novels which have been its inspiration. While I was spending months waiting, I have since read a total of seven books in the Will Trent series, though I have read them almost entirely out of order. However, since I originally wrote an article about the differences last spring I think its worth dealing with the similarities as well, because both of them are part of why I think Will Trent is as good as it is.

In Slaughter’s novels, Will is a tall, bulky and blonde which Ramon Rodriguez is not. That does not change the fact that Rodriguez is still the perfect Will Trent because he has both the awkwardness of the novel around so many other people, difficulties bonding with other people and the scars of his life in foster care. During the two part season finale the series paralleled a major storyline from the book involving Will’s backstory, which was related in the novel Broken. Will was the child of a prostitute who was tortured and eventually murdered by a serial killer whose identity was not revealed until the end of Season 1. (I am grateful I hadn’t read the books until that point.) The crimes were investigating by a young Amanda Wagner and Evelyn Mitchell, both beat cops in 1984 Atlanta. In the novel both women are white; in the series both are African-American.

I suspect in part this change was due to the series taking place in 2023 as opposed to the novel which takes place in 2014. The hills women had to climb in the 1970s are paralleled by the ones that African-Americans had to climb in the 1980s, and the fact that the series like the novel, is set in Atlanta is part of the reason. In both the book and the series, the killer is revealed after he begins a series of murders in the present and in both cases, the killer is Will’s father who is revealed to be the slimy attorney James Ulster. Greg Germann gives arguably the greatest performance in his career on television as Ulster; almost all of his characters drip of slime but this is the first one where you can practically smell the sulfur coming from him. At the climax of Season 1, Will delivered a beatdown, but stopped short of killing him choosing to arrest him for the murders he committed. (I’ll get to the consequences later on.)

Amanda is played brilliantly by Sonja Sohn in the series. (Sohn deservedly was nominated for Best Supporting Actress by the Astras.) In the novels there is no real sympathy in Amanda Wagner at all. She is a bully to everyone, including Will and Faith, never admits she is wrong on anything and almost never shows a sign of humanity. There is an assumption much of this is due to how she came up in the ranks of law enforcement in Broken but it does not make her character any more likable when we see her in action.

Sohn has the same toughness and brutality to her, but there are always signs of humanity in her that make the series work far better. In the first season finale she confided in Evelyn (Lisa Gay Hamilton) that she had been hiding the truth about Will his whole life. “Will is gonna hate me forever. He almost does already,” she confided. When she tells him about how she ended up discovering him and that she knew who his mother was, it was a painful scene but Sohn showed in it how much it broke her as well, something I can’t imagine playing out in the novels. The final scene of Season 1 showed the two of them talking and for the first time Amanda seemed fragile. We’ve seen scenes of humanity in Amanda throughout the first season and the second that I really think the character would have needed if the show was going to work, and in that sense Sohn is perfectly cast.

Faith Mitchell is played exceptionally by Ianthe Richardson and while her character is African-American in the series, every other aspect of her is the same. Will did end her mother’s thirty year career because of a corruption scandal and she was very reluctantly paired with him. Faith is diabetic and Will was one of the first people she confided in. Faith also had a child when she was only fourteen and both her mother and Amanda went out of their way to make sure she’s had next to no interaction with the boy’s father ever since. Faith has had a problematic relationship with her mother, but there have been signs it has been improving over the last few episodes. At this point in the series Faith and Will have a real rhythm that is more than earned.

Perhaps the biggest deviation has been the character of Michael Ormewood. If you are familiar with the novels you know all too well that Ormewood is the villain of the very first novel and doesn’t survive it. The decision to make him a foil of Will rather than a heavy has been one that has been slowly paying off as the series progressed. Jake McLaughlin has been doing a solid job as he has been an Atlanta detective with family issues. (At one point he had an affair with Angie, and its clear that there have been many. One of the nicer stories has been the parallel of Angie and Ormewood’s partnership with that of Will and Faith’s. He was a critical part of the Season 1 finale and McLaughlin’s work has been a service.

The second critical change has been that of Angie Polaski. As in the novel Angie is an Atlanta detective who was in many of the same foster homes as Will. They have been on and off throughout their whole life and they can’t decide whether they are good for each other or bad for each other. In the novels, there’s no question as to that: Angie is poisonous to Will. The books tell us that she has been abusive, refusing to ever offer comfort, calling him an idiot and a loser, utterly horrible to be around. The two are married in the books but it is more out of a dare than love: Angie is an agent of chaos. She is also barely capable of functioning as a cop. She has been using drugs and alcohol for as long Will knows her, has been having multiple affairs with people of both genders, and has committed countless illegal acts.

This is a polar difference from the version we see played by Erika Christensen (like Sohn, also nominated for an Astra). Angie has been sober for more than a year when we first meet her and her relationship with Will, while not healthy, is also not toxic. Angie also has been able to turn to Ormewood to deal with her demons and has a support system she clearly didn’t in the novels. That does not mean she isn’t capable of spiraling – late last season, a former foster father who had molested and impregnated her at fourteen, resurfaced and she spent much of the second half of the season, alternating between helping the new family he found and planning to kill him. That led to her ultimately being suspending from the force and at the climax of last season, abducted and nearly killed by James Ulster.

Now that I’ve brought you up to date on the difference, it’s time to deal with Season 2. Will has spent the first two episode, dealing but not really dealing with the trauma of last season. He has been learning Spanish in a way to be closer with his birth mother but he’s also had to deal with the fact that Ulster has been stalking him from prison. We learn that he has spending much of the last few months receiving lavish gifts from Ulster which he has been disposing off. The trauma is still haunting him in a way we haven’t seen before.

Angie has spent the last several months going through physical therapy. She and Will have not been together since then (the first time we see her, she’s having sex with her doctor – and using the opportunity to coerce him into signing her physical report) something they are both aware of. They haven’t spent a lot of time together in the first two episodes; Angie’s trying to put her own life back together. In the second episode, she was a sponsor of a teenage boy and spent much of the episode trying to get that kid out of his house. But she also encountered Crystal, the teenage girl she tried to ‘rescue’ from her foster father and who ended up killing him. I have a feeling this is going to be an issue going forward.

The first major investigation that made up the series involved a series of car bombing and a blackmail scheme that operated out of an Atlanta prison. The first episode had some superb moments as Will and Faith tracked down one of the targets, played with superb humor by that brilliant character actor Clark Gregg as he spent the episode trying to deny that there was anything that had gone wrong. Will also spent much of the episode in a flirtation with an explosives expert played wonderfully by Susan Kelechi Watson. When she managed to defuse a bomb Will told her: “I want to have dinner with you then go home and have sexual intercourse” with an enthusiasm we hadn’t seen in a while. But in keeping with how TV works, she died sacrificing herself from another bomb at the end of the first episode in front of Will’s eyes.

This led Will, still bearing the scars from the explosion, to go into the maximum security prison to find the men behind the bombing. When told by Amanda no one would talk to him, he said he knew someone who was dying to – and the season premier ended with him face to face with Ulster.

The second episode was far darker. Will spent the start of the episode using Ulster to get intelligence on the bomber – and when that led to him getting a beat down, he watched over a close-circuit feed for quite a few minutes before saying that should intervene. The smile on his face was not one we liked. As the investigation continued Will eventually found himself trapped in a cell with Ulster, answering questions he did not want to, clearly using every impulse he had not to snap his neck. The episode ended with Will tracking down the mastermind – and Ulster killing him in front of his eyes. “I killed for you,” he told Will proudly. I have a sinking feeling this is far from the end of it, and not just because Ulster is a prominent character for several of Slaughter’s novels.

Ormewood has spent the first two episodes dealing with his wife having an affair and the fact that his family may not love him. During the first episode Ormewood had a fight with his teenage son and ran through the Atlanta station that might soon blow up hoping the find him. He also spent much of last night’s episode helping his son with a science project and showing a familial warmth that the novels would never show. It’s not clear the fate of his marriage (that’s completely off-canon) but it’s a credit to the writers of the series that we care about this as much as anything that Will and Angie are dealing with.

There’s also the fact that Faith has hooked up with a reporter during the last few months and the two have been getting close. If you know the novels, you know that at some point Faith is going to get pregnant again. Amanda has spent the last two episodes with more of a human touch, in the last episode helping Angie rescue her sponsor. As always Amanda denied that she was doing it for anything other than selfish purposes.

If you’ve never read a single Karin Slaughter novel, you will absolutely love the series. If you have read every single Will Trent novel (another one came out this past year) I think you might be able to love the series despite all the differences. It is possible that the version we are getting is in part due to the fact it is on ABC and not cable or streaming. Had the novels been adapted for, say, Netflix or Showtime, we might get a version that is far closer to the original. There are TV version of mystery adaptations that follow this: Bosch from the Michael Connelly series that has been a staple of Amazon almost since it got into original programming or Dark Winds, which are a faithful version of Tony Hillerman’s novels. Considering the high quality of both series, it’s easy to imagine that a Will Trent series might follow a similar version: spend an entire season on a single novel and be closer to it in characters and personalities that what the ABC version is.

But honestly, it’s hard to imagine that potential cable or streaming version being anywhere near the caliber of the one ABC has produced. And just as honestly,  this Will Trent is the kind of series that network TV – and in fact all TV – needs more of going forward. There’s an elegance to every aspect of the series – from writing, directing and acting – to all of the technical aspects (by now the viewer loves waiting to see how the title will appear on screen). And Will Trent has a humanity and layers to its characters that far too many of the current crop of ‘appointment TV’ (I’m thinking of Euphoria and The Morning Show in particular) don’t even pretend to have for either its characters or the viewers. You connect with the characters in Will Trent in a way that is absent from too much of the best television these days and that’s a quality I cling too.

Can Will Trent break into the Emmys this year? That may not be impossible considering that much of the 2024 nominations for Drama will be dealing with the ramifications from the strike. With Succession gone, The Last of Us and Yellowjackets not due back until 2025 and House of the Dragon not coming back until the summer, there will be a lot of gaps to fill in the drama category this year. Will Trent certainly has the capability to do it and a high caliber list of performers who could. I hope that when it comes to recognizing quality, the Emmys can be as observant of this show as the title character is of practically everything around him.

My score: 5 stars.