From Morgan Freeman’s interpretation in “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider” to Tyler Perry‘s attempted reboot with 2012’s “Alex Cross,” James Patterson’s famed literary detective has always been strong fodder for visual adaptation. However, speaking for a recent piece in The New York Times, Patterson admits that while his books make for easy reading, Cross was never as fleshed out as he probably should’ve been. That all changed with Amazon Prime Video‘s new TV series “Cross” created by Ben Watkins and starring Aldis Hodge.
“My strength as a storyteller is that I get people flying through the pages,” Patterson wrote in an email to The NYT. “My weakness is that I don’t always dig as deep as I could. Ben Watkins and his team dug deep and revealed a more complicated Alex Cross. We both wanted the new Cross to be more relevant and realistic while continuing to show Alex as a dedicated family man.”
In the series, as with the novels, Cross is a widower whose grief often drives his decision-making process for better and worse. Speaking in the same piece for The New York Times, Watkins expressed his desire to not just revitalize a beloved character, but give fans and newcomers a fresh interpretation.
“I want to create a character who is dealing with grief and making choices that are having a negative impact on the people around them,” said Watkins. “It’s an iconic detective, but your journey as a character is really going to be about you confronting your own emotional burdens and figuring out a way through them.”
With his wife not around to support him as he faces the burdens of a difficult, often gruesome job, Cross’s relationship to his colleague and best friend, Sampson (Isaiah Mustafa), takes on a new importance that Hodge feels really grounds the story and offers something different.
“It’s not a romantic love story, obviously, but a familial, brotherly love story, and that’s something that’s really important to me,” Hodge said. “We get to see these two men, these two Black men, that are really supporting each other’s best efforts.”
He added, “To be able to have that represented on television, something that I’m familiar with in my own personal life, amongst my group of friends, is amazing.”
All episodes of “Cross” are now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.