ABC’s ‘Will Trent’ appeals to dyslexia experts — sight unseen

Pete Pullen is already a fan of “Will Trent,” and he hasn’t seen it yet.

Shannon Koenen won’t go quite that far. She’s a fan of the concept — but she wants to make sure the title character in the new ABC series isn’t too heroic.

With dyslexia, “We tell our kids, ‘That’s your superpower,’ ” said Pullen, the Head of School & Center at Eton Academy in Birmingham, Michigan. “This reading thing, we’re going to get to that.”

Good, said Koenen, president of the International Dyslexia Association’s Michigan chapter. Be positive. But “this sort of upside of being dyslexic is oversold a little bit, in my opinion.”

“Will Trent,” based on a series of crime novels by Karin Slaughter, alit on the Tuesday night schedule in early January. It revolves around a detective with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations who is smart, quirky, damaged, brusque, dapper and utterly confounding to his colleagues.

He’s also severely dyslexic, which helps explain some of the other traits — and, by way of coping, has equipped him with particularly keen powers of observation and deduction.

Trent is a compelling character and “Will Trent,” through four snappy episodes, has been a let’s-stick-with-it show. But as his dyslexia plays an increasingly large role, it seems reasonable to ask: Does this latest police procedural have a clue?

The simple description tells Pullen and Koenen that yes, it does — which makes it a teaching tool for those of us who’ve never had to see the alphabet as an opponent.

Gifts and pitfalls

Trent, played by Ramon Rodriguez, is the sort of character whose issues have issues. Abandoned as a child, abused in foster care and group homes, he's a friend to dogs and underdogs but a mystery at police headquarters, hiding much of himself to keep his learning disability a secret.

That rings true, said Pullen, who leads a school of 220 or so students with learning challenges from grades 1 to 12.

"Unfortunately, if you can't break this code you're thought of as not being intelligent," he said. "So you really struggle with self esteem and not feeling that you are capable."

With encouragement and training, however, the same students can harness "this amazing ability to be creative," he said. "One way to be creative is the ability to connect things in ways no one else has thought of in terms of a goal or objective."

That might mean art or science or, in prime time, tracking murderers.

In one scene, Trent finds a victim's driver's license in the woods, can't immediately decipher the name, and forgets whatever reading tools he might normally fall back on when another detective asks whose it is. In an early episode, an antagonist he'd known in a group home publicly dismisses him as illiterate.

"It's a horrible experience for most kids going through school, with scars they carry through life," said Koenen, a former teacher who absorbed herself in the subject after her son, now 20, was diagnosed as a second grader.

She cites studies that show people with dyslexia are burdened with higher than normal rates of anxiety, depression, incarceration and drug and alcohol addiction.

“Sometimes I think we do a disservice to kids pointing out this gift of dyslexia,” she said, without also warning of pitfalls.

Virgin Group billionaire Richard Branson, Cher, Anderson Cooper, Whoopi Goldberg and Albert Einstein are among those who’ve acknowledged their dyslexia or even credited it for their success.

“It’s not that people with dyslexia can’t be very successful,” Koenen said. “But it’s not like everyone has this special gift of seeing the world differently and being an artist or an entrepreneur.”

A detective's strength

The Society for Neuroscience estimates that 5% to 15% of Americans have some level of dyslexia, from barely perceptible to paralyzing. Other estimates cap the figure at 10%, but even the low end means 15 million people.

Among that group is Slaughter's sister, who helped inspire the character.

“Dyslexics tend to be great puzzle solvers, and this seemed to play into the strengths that detectives need,” said Slaughter, an executive producer on the show. In 2008, when the second of her 11 Trent novels hit the shelves, she told Publishers Weekly that "people will talk about handicaps, but I think that the body and the brain have wonderful ways of adapting and learning new things, so I try to show that with Will.”

Dyslexic characters have appeared on television at least since 1991, when Tori Spelling's Donna Martin was diagnosed on "Beverly Hills 90210." But Will Trent might be the most shaped by it, which left Pullen surprised that word hadn't spread through the learning-disability pipeline.

"I feel guilty I didn't know about it," he said, but he plans to make amends.

A binge-watch will likely take up part of his weekend, and if he's as moved as he expects to be, Slaughter might find herself invited to lecture at Eton.

She'd probably feel at home, he said — and Will Trent definitely would.

Reach Neal Rubin at @NARubin@freepress.com, or via Twitter at @nealrubin_fp.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ABC’s ‘Will Trent’ appeals to Michigan dyslexia experts