Will Trent

The Geometry of a Broken Man

Network TV is supposed to run like an assembly line. Crime goes in, quirky detective comes out, and forty-two minutes later the world is tidy again. I’ve seen enough of these to feel the beat before it lands. So when ABC’s *Will Trent* premiered in 2023—based on Karin Slaughter’s airport-staple novels—I braced for the usual sheen. I expected the kind of genius who solves murders by glaring at a blood spatter pattern. Instead I got a dyslexic guy in a three-piece suit, carrying a rescue chihuahua named Betty, trying to figure out how to be a person.



It shouldn’t work. On paper, Will sounds like a checklist of eccentric traits. He dictates notes into an antique cassette recorder. He wears those spotless suits to hide the scars from a childhood spent surviving Atlanta’s overcrowded foster care system. But Ramón Rodríguez makes it feel real by making it hurt. Rodríguez—a Puerto Rican actor who swaps his natural Nuyorican rhythm for a hesitant, gravelly Southern drawl—changes his whole physical shape here. He keeps his shoulders tight, like he’s always waiting for someone to swing. In the quieter scenes, especially around Angie (Erika Christensen), his erratic, recovering-addict love interest, the tells are everywhere: the fidgeting hands, the darting eyes. He’s good at the job not because he has some magic gift, but because trauma trained him to spot what doesn’t fit.

Under creators Daniel T. Thomsen and Liz Heldens, the series works like a Trojan horse. It shows up wearing the familiar uniform of a police procedural—state agents stepping on local toes—and then it turns into something more like a story about coping strategies.



I also can’t get over how the show frames Atlanta. It isn’t the slick, neon cityscape you get in most modern thrillers. It’s dusty, humid, sun-baked. You can practically feel the sweat sitting on the collars of Will’s partner, Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson), who cuts through his stiff awkwardness with tired pragmatism—and a genuinely excellent rotation of brightly colored sweaters. The camera doesn’t leer at the violence, which is a relief. It hangs back and watches what the violence does to people afterward. Early on, there’s a small scene where Will adopts Betty. He doesn’t want her, tries to dump her at a shelter, and then the camera just stays on his face as he looks at this shivering, unwanted creature. You can see the exact second his own past catches him. He can’t leave her. It’s tiny, but it tells you more about his inner wiring than a dozen speeches ever could.

As *The Guardian*’s Jack Seale put it, Will is “quirky as hell but not in a way that stops him being a relatable human.” That’s the narrow ledge the show has to keep walking. And no, it doesn’t always stick the landing. In season one especially, the case-of-the-week mechanics can feel a little too tidy, with endings that snap into place even when the characters’ lives are anything but neat.



But by the third season and into the current fourth, the show finally lets things stay rough around the edges. Will and Angie—two damaged kids from the same group home who keep rescuing and wrecking each other—have become genuinely hard to watch in the best way. I don’t really know where the writers are taking them, and that not-knowing is a big part of why I keep showing up. Most series would’ve married them or slammed the door shut by now. Here they hover in that grey zone, doing the job and hauling around what happened to them when they were kids.

I didn’t expect to care this much about a broadcast-network cop show. But there’s real warmth under the murders and the snark. *Will Trent* never pretends the solve fixes the world. It just suggests that if you look closely enough at the broken pieces, you might be able to patch yourself together—just enough to get to tomorrow.