ABC’s Will Trent will return for Season 3 in early 2025, which feels like a long time to wait. While some fans of the series likely came to it as built-in fans of Karin Slaughter’s books, there’s a large percentage of the audience for whom the series is the only version of Will Trent they’re familiar with. During this year’s ATX TV Festival, showrunners Liz Heldens and Daniel Thomsen joined a panel called “From Book to Script to Screen” about the process of adapting novels into episodic television.
(Stephanie Tacy/ATX/ABC)
Liz Heldens picked up her first Will Trent novel in 2012, and like so many readers, she was immediately fascinated by the lead character. As a TV writer and producer, she began to imagine it as episodic television but thought Will Trent was too introverted of a character. Karin Slaughter’s books may spend two pages detailing the GBI Special Agent’s internal thoughts, which lead to two syllables of dialogue. An insular story about an agent trying to hide his disability felt like a daunting task to translate into a visual medium like television. But during production on The Passage, she decided to share some of the novels with her producing partner, Daniel Thomsen, who saw in Will Trent what Liz saw.
Adapting Will Trent was not without its challenges. Liz and Daniel’s first attempt was a faithful adaptation of the first book in Karin Slaughter’s series, Triptych, spread across ten episodes. This type of adaptation is more commonly seen on cable and streaming platforms, but Will Trent found its home on a traditional broadcast network, ABC, which was seeking a serialized series. This presented a unique challenge: Creating a version of Will Trent that stayed true to Karin Slaughter’s literary world while also standing on its own as a television entity.
One of the ways the Will Trent series departs from the novels is with the casting of its lead actor and producing partner, Ramón Rodríguez. In the books, Will Trent is a tall man who towers over everyone, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Ramón Rodríguez likely wasn’t who readers were visualizing as they read Karin Slaughter’s books, but during the audition process, Ramón Rodríguez continually demonstrated all of the internal aspects of the character, which are hard to convey. His casting has been a blessing in disguise, allowing the writers to pursue paths that are rarely seen on television, like his attempts to reconnect with his mother through her Puerto Rican heritage in the second season.
What remains in the Will Trent TV series from Karin Slaughter’s books are the main characters and their overarching narratives. The writers occasionally draw inspiration from the novels when crafting cases, but those are mostly unique to the show and among the most fun aspects of the writers’ room. The cases are often designed to connect to the evolution of Will, Faith, Angie, and Michael’s character development, which is part of the show’s secret sauce. Liz and Dan have been pleasantly surprised by the ways the series has taken on a life of its own. For example, Liz didn’t foresee the show being so focused on fashion and style, the result of a stellar costume department that brought their A-game to the project.
Liz and Dan were joined by showrunners behind other recent TV adaptations of published works, including Graham Yost (Silo), Jessica Rhoades (Black Mirror), Mike Flanagan (The Fall of the House of Usher), and Rolin Jones (Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire). One of the questions was about Internet fandom and whether or not they read what’s out there. Naturally, with so many departures from Karin Slaughter’s source material, the nature of a primetime series adaptation turned away some of the book’s biggest fans, who were vocal about their initial displeasure with the adaptation. However, the audience that has remained with the show, whether new to the story via this adaptation or readers who found room for both versions of Will Trent in their hearts, are happy with it. And, of course, they have an ally in Karin Slaughter herself, who regularly interacts with her readers and is a fan of the series adaption herself. Among the most rewarding parts of leading the series is when Liz and Dan receive text messages from the author with praise from a recent episode.
While Will Trent has mostly been a case-of-the-week style show, with a few two-part episodes across its two seasons, Liz shared that she and Daniel have ambitions to tell longer stories in Season 3, which is expected to have the series’ first three-part case. That’s the extent of news regarding Season 3 from the panel, but with summer quickly approaching, fans of ABC’s Will Trent who are looking for some good summer reading may feel inspired to pick up one of Karin Slaughter’s books to find a deeper appreciation for how the literary version of Will Trent compares to the visual world Liz and Dan have helped create.
Stay tuned to Laughing Place for future news about ABC’s Will Trent. Click here for more coverage from ATX TV Festival.
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