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TV review: Will Trent is like Monk, but kind of normal [1]
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Date: 2023-01-10
A lot of people have been saying that there needs to be more diversity on television. Will Trent, a new show on ABC starring Ramón Rodríguez, might be a good step in that direction. Often you can correctly pick out the actor for the black character in an IMDb page because he or she is the only one. That’s not the case with Will Trent’s IMDb page.
The show, based on the books by Karin Slaughter, started on ABC as a midseason replacement last Tuesday. Like The Rookie: Feds starring Niecy Nash, Will Trent is also available on Hulu. The books describe a couple of important characters as white who on the show are played by actors who are not white. Surely there’s been some backlash over that, but maybe not as much as with Percy Jackson or the Game of Thrones prequel.
I actually watched the whole pilot on Hulu, even though for me streaming is not the most conducive for me to get into a new show. For example, I started to watch the pilot for The Rookie: Feds on Hulu, then stopped halfway through, thinking I could resume it whenever I wanted. I still haven’t resumed it. Don’t know if Hulu will remember where I left off.
The pilot episode for Will Trent starts like a run-of-the-mill police procedural. A cartoonish bloody footprint sure doesn’t help sell the show. I could very well have stopped watching at that point. But then I got invested in the story and watched to the end of the pilot episode.
Abigail Campano (Jennifer Morrison) has just found her mansion has been broken into, and there’s some creepy young man in her daughter’s bedroom.
Abigail’s husband, Paul (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), is on the phone with her and calls the police. Abigail struggles with the creepy young man and easily kills him by strangling him with a tennis racket.
The police show up quite promptly, investigate. The lead detective thinks he’s got everything all figured out: the young man smashed some glass in the front door so he could turn the knob, then raped and killed Emma Campano, and Abigail killed him in self-defense.
Meanwhile, Special Agent Will Trent (Rodríguez) of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI) is trying to get rid of a currently stray dog, Betty, a rottweiler chihuahua (or chiweiler), I’m guessing, at a shelter (by the way, Rodríguez was in Megan Leavey). The workers there want to convince him to take in the poor animal, so they float the possibility that the unfortunate dog might be euthanized.
So Will takes the dog back to his house, in his car that has been vandalized by some angry cops: he’s been in the news for his commendable work ferreting out dirty cops, which of course hasn’t made him any friends in either the GBI or the Atlanta Police Department.
Will is assigned the Campano case. He shows up at the Campano mansion, and looks around like some sort of Puerto Rican Adrian Monk, quickly noticing obvious details that a bunch of cops missed. Will looks out of place with his oddly unfashionable three-piece suit, something I’m guessing Rodríguez would never wear if he wasn’t playing a character on TV or in a movie.
The Campano case is just not as simple as the cops thought. Much like Adrian Monk would, Will Trent realizes that the alleged intruder would have to be Plastic Man if he opened the mansion’s front door the way the cops think he did.
But instead of obsessive-compulsive disorder like Adrian Monk, Will Trent suffers from severe dyslexia. In some other ways, he’s quite normal. For example, he has a casual sexual relationship with Detective Angie Polaski (Erika Christensen).
And he’s aware of how widely disliked he is. Will’s GBI partner, Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson), takes quite a long time to warm up to him, since, after all, she blames him for ending her mother’s otherwise distinguished law enforcement career.
I don’t consider it a spoiler to tell you that Paul Campano, like Will Trent, was an orphan who aged out of the foster care system. Nor do I consider it a spoiler to tell you that the open-ended pilot episode ends with Paul at Will’s door, with blood on his shirt, asking for Will’s help.
Critics who’ve read the books seem to think the show’s pilot episode has gone too fast with exposition that takes a bit longer in the books. But, as someone who has not read any of the books, I think there is plenty left to reveal about Will Trent. I definitely intend to watch the second episode.
★★★★☆ plus a half star. TV-14, mostly for violence.
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