Will Trent Showrunners on Adapting the Source Material and the Major Change They Made | ATX TV Festival

This month, the ATX Television Festival hosted a panel titled “From Book to Script to Screen,” and it featured showrunners from various shows, including Liz Heldens and Daniel Thomsen, who serve as the showrunners and executive producers on Will Trent.

Heldens and Thomsen discussed the process for pitching the series, the challenges they’ve faced adapting Karin Slaughter’s books, and some changes they’ve made from the source material.

“If anybody is familiar with the Will Trent book series, the second book is called Fractured, and when Liz [Heldens] and I first started coming up with our pitch for how we wanted to do this show, we were going to take the story of Fractured, which is a missing girl, and do it over ten episodes,” Thomsen explained.

“We ended up selling this to ABC, and they wanted us to do more of the case of the week model,” Thomsen said.

However, they’ve made the case-of-the-week format work for them.

Heldens said, “We can do two-parters. We have an ambition this year to do three-parters, but mostly, [the show does] contained stories, and that’s been very different from the books. But that’s just where we are, and what we’ve been tasked with. And we’ve been really surprised and happy with how much we can character and serialized story within that structure.”

“Also, ABC has this thing called Standards and Practices. I don’t know if anybody has read the books, but they are a bit gorier,” Thomsen joked.

Another challenge they’ve faced is translating the character of Will Trent from the pages to the screen.

Heldens explained, “Will Trent, for example, is such an internal character. Karin Slaughter will say that there will be like two pages of his thoughts, and then his line in the book will be like ‘yes.’”

“She’s got a wicked sense of humor, and there’s so much humor in his mind. And so for us, it’s trying to find ways to get that out. He talks to his dog. He talks into his tape recorder. He talks to people that aren’t there a lot. So we’ve had to get really creative in that way.”

The biggest change the show has made involves Will himself.

Heldens said, “Ramón Rodriguez was not anybody’s idea of Will Trent, and there was a little bit of surprise, I’ll say, when he was cast. But I think that he has built a character from the ground up, and I think he really understands the essence of Will Trent.”

 “Like he’s written as a 6’4” white guy, and I’m so happy we have him as the number one on our show because there are a lot of 6ft+ tall white guys on TV, and there’s not a lot of Ramón Rodriguezes on TV.”

“He’s so protective of the character. He understands him on a cellular level,” Heldens added. 

“And the fact that he’s Puerto Rican, we’ve been able to make story out of that like, you know, about him trying to learn Spanish with a Southern accent, and he’s bad at it. And it’s funny because he [Rodriguez] speaks fluent Spanish. We’ve been able to make story out of who we cast in that part in a way that has given us a lot of story wells and rich material, and it is speaking to an audience that doesn’t get to see itself on TV as much as they should.”

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Will Trent airs on ABC.

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Allison Nichols

Allison is in a love affair with television that doesn't seem to be letting up anytime soon. Slightly damaged fictional characters are her weakness. She loves to spend her free time curled up with a cat and a show to binge-watch. Allison is a Tomatometer-approved critic (Rotten Tomatoes).