Ahead of the premiere of Season 3, ‘Dark Winds’ showrunner and executive producer John Wirth sat down with Metro to delve into the intricate and ever-evolving story, based partially on the novels by Tony Hillerman.
When you were approached with this show back in Season 2, why sign on?
A few reasons. One, going way back when I was in my 20s, I always read a lot of detective mystery fiction. I really got involved in the [Tony] Hillerman books, I read probably all of ’em as they came out as a young man. I was very intrigued with the whole thing. I remember when Robert Redford got the rights and he made a couple of movies on PBS, I think he did ‘Skin Walkers’ and one other one—Chris Eyre I think directed those pictures. I was very into those as well.
Then I started my own career as a Hollywood writer and went on my way for 40 years, and suddenly I was presented with this opportunity to come on the show in the second season. There were two things that attracted to me to the show at that point in time, aside from my love of the novels: One was getting to work with Robert Redford [as a producer] and by extension, George R.R. Martin. And then also getting a chance to work with Zahn McClarnon [Joe Leaphorn in the show.]
It must be interesting to be a fan of the novels and then get to adapt them to the screen. How do you choose what to follow and what points you take your own creative license?
It’s complicated, but basically we take everything we can from the novels that works in our stories. Usually it’s the setup or the superstructure of the piece in terms of just broadly, the beginning, middle, and end. There are many things in the novels which went into the novels in the 70s and 80s and in 2025, the world is a much different place….We’re doing a show about Navajo people and we have a lot of native writers and Navajo consultants and so forth. There are many things in the novels which we don’t feel comfortable putting on television.
So in that case, we end up having to invent. For example, in Season 3, we used two novels. One is ‘Dance Hall of the Dead’, which is about the murder of a boy on the Zuni reservation and it involved Kachinas ceremonies and the cosmology surrounding that. That stuff is all very sensitive culturally, we did not want to put that on screen or dramatize it for our television show. So we had to create something that would stand in for that. That’s where the monster came from….And we sort of developed a mythology around this monster, which, it makes sense for Navajo people, but it’s not a ceremonially sensitive area. So we’re able to portray it in the show.
Season 3 extends the story of some characters and also introduces some new ones. What can you tease in that regard?
Well, we are carrying forward the story of the death of the Leaphorn’s child—this story that started in Season 1. I may be misremembering this, but I don’t believe the Leaphorn’s had a child who died in the novels. I think that was something that was created by Graham Roland who created the series. For me, it was a happy accident because that’s one of the things that resonated with me about Season 1, so when I came to Season 2, I wanted to explore that further. And we were really working off the novel ‘People of Darkness’ in Season 2.
Then as we picked up in Season 3 and began talking about what we could do and how could we adapt ‘Dance Hall of the Dead’, it became apparent that we weren’t done with that story, we had more to tell there. We started exploring what happens to a person who has such a strong moral code and violates it, and how does his guilt over what he did [at the end of Season 2], which he holds as a secret—how does that manifest?
So really, the story for our core characters is a continuation of that story. Bernadette [Jessica Matten], of course, had made the decision to lead the Navajo Tribal Police, so we tell her story. Then we bring in new characters to support the new story that we have going: An FBI agent named Sylvia Washington, played beautifully by Jenna Elfman, and she puts external pressure on Leaphorn which then exacerbates his internal haunting. And then Bruce Greenwood plays a rancher and an oil man who is having some financial problems himself and figures out a way to save this ranch. Bernadette kind of goes head to head with him in her storyline.
As a fan of the stories overall, which characters or moments from the series have been fun for you to see come to fruition?
‘Dark Winds’ started out as a TV show based on the novels and the deeper you get into the TV show, at some point there’s a separation. It cuts the umbilical cord from the mothership of the novels and then stands on its own as its own separate thing. So the characters evolve in a way based upon the actors who are portraying them, and we’ve had to put our own characters in these stories, whether they appeared in the novels of these stories or not.
So in terms of the characters, there are certain stories that resonate with me. I really wanted to tell the story of the marriage between Joe and Emma Leaphorn [Deanna Taushi Allison] and how the death of a child would impact their marriage. I also really resonated with Joe Lephorn and Gordo Sena’s [A Martinez] friendship. Gordo Sena is a very minor character in the novels, hardly worth mentioning, but once we cast A Martinez in the role, he’s got tremendous chemistry with Z. So I just really enjoyed seeing those two guys together on camera and telling a story where they could interact with each other.
‘Dark Winds‘ Season 3 premieres March 9 on AMC and AMC+
