John Wirth on AMC’s “Dark Winds” Season 4 – Showrunner Interview on the Hit Navajo Crime Drama Series”

Dark Winds, like many successful television shows, began its creative life as a popular series of novels – in this case the Leaphorn & Chee novels written by Tony Hillerman. The TV series on AMC, now in Season 4, stars Zahn McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon in the title roles. The TV adaptation was created by Graham Rowland. John Wirth took over the showrunner reins in the second season. John spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about the evolution of the show and setting the current season to Los Angeles.

Describe your conversations with creator Graham Rowland regarding the scope and direction of Dark Winds.

I came on the show at the beginning of Season 2. We had another showrunner Vince Calandra in Season 1, but he left.

I met with Graham after I was already hired. As it turns out, we have a number of mutual friends in the business that we’ve worked with, and they were telling us to get together.

He was talking about what attracted him to the show. We talked a lot initially about what went right and what could be improved upon in Season 2.

Graham was not performing day to day services on the show at that point. We had many conversations over the course of Season 2 and I invited him to co-write the season finale with me..

John Wirth. Photo courtesy of Getty Images

What is your approach towards maintaining fidelity to Tony Hillerman’s novels?

I think one of the hallmarks of my writing, no matter what show I’ve done over the last 45 years, is an element of heart at the center. I like to write deeply about characters and bring a heart to the piece, which is either an underlay or an overlay on the plot. I’ve written a lot of shows that are plot-driven. So, I like to look at what is driving a character in any given scene, and moving a character from scene to scene.

The place I’ve come to is the novel and the television show are their own thing. They’re separated by birth.

Novels, especially those written before the turn of the century, particularly detective novels, are written in a way that’s more colloquial or simpler. We’ve seen so much of this kind of material on television in the last 25 years, or maybe even longer.

My first job on television was Remington Steele. That was a detective show in the 80s, so, a lot of this ground has been covered. To just follow a novel’s story, which has the advantage of a built-in leisure to it, for a television audience in 2026, is challenging.

There are other aspects of the Hillerman novels which present challenges for us. Tony Hillerman is not indigenous, and the sensitivity toward appropriation is very much heightened now versus the time when Hillerman wrote his books. There are some people on the Navajo Nation who feel that Tony Hillerman appropriated their story for his novels.

I don’t feel like that. I read those novels when I was in my 20s and I loved them. I adored his insight into the Navajo culture and that was super interesting to me. And I think it’s super interesting to our audience today.

What I’ve tried to do with those novels is, with regard to the Navajo aspects, is run them through a Navajo lens. More than half of my writers’ room is native. We have two Navajo consultants that are in the writers’ room all the time. And everything runs through that lens. We’re retelling the Hillerman stories through an indigenous lens versus a Caucasian lens. Same story, but a different point of view.

And in addition, Hillerman’s novels are complicated because they’re the Leaphorn and Chee novels. Some novels feature Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee together. Some novels feature them individually.

There are aspects of certain novels that I love, which I have chosen to adapt for the television show that don’t have Leaphorn in them. For example, for People of Darkness, Season 2, Leaphorn did not appear in that novel.

Leaphorn appears very lightly in The Ghost Way, which is Season 4. Since he’s the star of our show, we have to invent quite a bit to figure out how to put him into the show when he’s not in the novels.

What were some aspects of Navajo culture that you paid special attention to in Dark Winds?

One of the aspects that was featured in Season 1 was the Navajo mysticism with witches. That is not a true thing in the Navajo culture, but it’s absolutely on brand for AMC.

So having not been there, I understand how they went down that road. I tried to refine my way down a road that was similar, but hewed closer to what Navajo culture really is.

Navajo people are very protective of their religion, their ceremonies, their prayers, their songs, anything related to their inner beings and identity, and how they came to be on the earth and how they are connected to the land.

They don’t want it to be on TV. Anytime we do something that dramatizes something like that, we will play along the edges of it.

For instance, in Season 2, we did a first laugh ceremony for a baby. I thought it was a moving sequence. But we did not betray any of the private ceremonial aspects or the prayers or the songs.

We went into it. We showed the setup of it. And then we showed what we could show, and then we cut away from it to protect the privacy of the Navajo people.

In Season 4, we did a similar thing for the ghostway ceremony. We show the guests arriving to the ceremony. And then we see our principal characters who are going to be involved in the ghostway ceremony go into a hogan and close the rug over the door so we don’t actually see what happens.

Emma Leaphorn (Deanna Allison) & Joe Leaphorn (Dahn McClarnon) Photo courtesy of AMC Networks.

Discuss the comparison between Navajo and Western policing.

In any environment there are always jurisdictional issues.

Even in the City of Los Angeles, most recently, we’ve had jurisdictional issues between ICE and local police agencies. In the Navajo Nation, it’s the same. There are a number of police agencies that work in and around the Navajo Nation.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) have a police force, the Navajo Tribal Police exist, there are local sheriffs, county sheriffs, and city police. I’m very interested in the jurisdictional issues because, in the Navajo Nation, by federal law, the Navajo cops are not allowed to investigate murders that happen on the reservation. That falls under a federal jurisdiction, the FBI.

We’ve played a fair amount of sandpaper between those two agencies. With Gordo Sena (A. Martinez) and Joe Leaphorn, Sena has been both a County Sheriff and an acting chief of police for the City of Scarborough. And they tend to work together.

There is a thing which is referred to as cross-commission amongst police agencies. There is a standing understanding that agencies are cross-commissioned to help one another on a case when one agency or the other does not have full jurisdiction.

Along with the jurisdictional issues comes racism and looking down upon the Navajo Tribal Police as not worthy. We like to play in all of those areas.

What is the Ghost Sickness?

Jim Chee is our Navajo cop who is the least connected to his traditional upbringing, religion and mythology. In the beginning of this season, he decides to go into a hogan where a dead body exists, which is a taboo in Navajo culture. He just decides to blow it off and go in there anyway.

That is the beginning of his ghost sickness, which he contracts. I leave it to the audience to decide if his symptoms are real or imagined.

Billie Tsosie (Isabel Deroy-Olson) Photo courtesy of AMC Networks

Season 4 is set in Los Angeles, 1972. Explain how this change of location recalibrates the series.

Historically, California’s been a place where people come to reinvent themselves. We spend the first couple of episodes positioning them within themselves and their relationships after they leave the Navajo Nation.

They’re pretty clear about who they are and what’s going on between them when they’re on the Navajo reservation. When they leave their reservation and come to the big city, everything changes. Suddenly, Chee has a little more authority because he has actually lived in Los Angeles before and he knows the streets a little bit.

He’s got some contacts with the FBI, so that gives him a leg up. It changes the dynamic. What was attractive to me and to our writers, was putting these cops off balance and having them in an environment that they’re not familiar with, is a little overwhelming, forcing them to examine and solidify their personal relationships, and rise above whatever is going on within them.

In Chee’s case, it’s the ghost sickness. It’s Leaphorn’s decision to give Bernadette Manuelita (Jessica Matten) the Lieutenant bars when he retires causing friction between her and Jim. All the while, they have to figure out how to find this missing girl, boarding school runaway Billie Tsosie (Isabel Deroy-Olson) before the worst happens to her.

Talk about Joe’s estranged wife Emma and Jim’s estranged partner Bernadette?

What’s interesting about Emma (Deanna Allison) is she stands apart from the central action of the show as the wife of the star.

She is a nurse – a professional woman and has a real job with real stakes. But it’s not that easy to connect her job to the case at hand. So, we started exploring.

The other thing is that Navajo, like a number of indigenous cultures, is that it’s matrilineal – tracing ancestry through females. Women in the Navajo culture have a much different position than in Western cultures.

I was very interested in putting the marriage front and center, especially after the events of Season 1, when we discovered that they had a son, Joe Junior (Hataaliinez El Wheeler) who was killed in an apparent mining accident. That led into the discovery that, in Season 2, he was actually murdered by industrialist B.J. Vines (John Diehl).

That led to Joe’s being haunted in Season 3 by the consequences of that decision he made to kill Vines. All of it involved the evolution and de-evolution of their marriage. We’re exploring it a little bit more in Season 5.

Joe and Emma’s marriage is very much at the heart center of the TV show. Figuring out where it ends up has been both fun and really challenging.

Irene Vaggan (Franka Potente) Photo courtesy of AMC Networks

Irene Vagaan isn’t your average hit woman. How did you create her character?

Hats off to the writers who invented that character. She really is a sociopath and a psychopath and the victim of what was going on in Germany in the 30s and the 40s Nazism and the cult of celebrity. Plus, being a woman raised during those years.

Also, hats off to Franka Potente who brought an energy,  a deep pathology and understanding of Irene’s character. She made me feel uncomfortable. Her interactions with Leaphorn are fantastic. In a lot of stories like this, characters like Vagaan are cardboard cut-out bad guy/ gal characters. In the book, the character was a tall white man with blonde hair similar to Colton Wolfe (Nicholas Logan), who appeared in Season 2. I decided we needed to change it up and do something different. We made her a female and then looked for the right person to embody that character.

by Staff Writer

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