PATIENCE Key Art – Season 1 | ©2025 PBS

The first season of PATIENCE is now on PBS Sunday nights, with episodes streaming on PBS platforms thereafter. The U.K.-based procedural drama stars Ella Maisy Purvis as the title character, a criminologist with the York police records department. Patience is neurodivergent, with a talent for seeing patterns that others miss. Her skills bring her to the attention of Detective Inspector Bea Metcalf (Laura Fraser), who brings Patience onto her team to help solve cases.

One aspect of PATIENCE that makes it unusual is that star Purvis, like her character, is neurodivergent.

Writer Matt Baker helped adapt PATIENCE from the French series ASTRID, which was created by Laurent Burtin & Alexandre de Seguins. Baker previously created the series HOTEL PORTOFINO and, with PATIENCE colleague Stephen Brady, was a writer on PROFESSOR T.

Baker gets on a Zoom call to discuss his experiences with PATIENCE. He says he became involved in the project “in the same way that I’ve become involved with a number of other [PATIENCE production company] Eagle Eye projects, I’ve done quite a lot of work with them now – I’ve done two seasons of PROFESSOR T, three seasons of HOTEL PORTOFINO – so they approached me [with] the idea of adapting PATIENCE.

“ASTRID has been a very successful show. I think they’d obviously had the conversations going on for a while, and when they got the green light, I think across the U.K. and the U.S., they approached me [to be] the lead writer on this. I was put together with two writers, Sarah Freethy and Daniella DeVinter, and then later on in the process, with Stephen Brady. So, it was a collaborative process.”

How did changing the name of the series and the character from the French ASTRID to the British PATIENCE come about?

“Well, I think ‘Patience’ certainly is a more British name. There were lots of different thoughts behind that. I think, inevitably, when you’re doing adaptations from the original, there’s always a core of people who feel slightly offended that you’re messing around with this show that they love and built a relationship with. So, sometimes it’s quite useful to be able to signal differentiation, to give it a different name. I think ‘Patience’ just came out of a brainstorming process and it just immediately worked for the character, and it spoke to the difference we were trying to bring to the central characterization in the show.

“ASTRID is a brilliant show, and I love it, and there’s a lot of creativity and a lot of originality in it. I think we felt that there’s no point adapting a show if you don’t think you can build on something, or change it, or maybe even improve it. And we felt we wanted to go down quite a different route with the portrayal of the lead character.

“It’s more slightly wary talking about the spectrum when it comes to autism, because I think there are people who don’t like the terminology. But it’s undeniably true that in public, in media portrayals of people with an autism diagnosis, there has been a tendency to portray people who are quite a long way up the spectrum, and we were trying to change that a little bit. We wanted to create a character who was a bit less ‘other,’ who stood out a little bit less, but nonetheless had many of the same challenges associated with trying to navigate a neurotypical world when you’ve got a diagnosis of neurodivergence. But also, [to have] some of the traits that are associated with autism actually bring advantages for her in terms of the work that she’s doing as a criminologist. So, all that was part of the process when we were naming it.”

Baker expands on the differences in the approach toward neurodivergence in ASTRID and in PATIENCE

“Although our character, in the first season, in the first episodes, in terms of some of the prejudice that people with an autism diagnosis experience in real life, I suspect the degree of questioning that Patience confronts is probably quite mild, so I’m sure some people experience a much greater degree of prejudice than our characters do. But in the original, the way [Astrid] behaves, the way she talks, the way she interacts with people marks her out as ‘other.’

“I think in our portrayal, although we don’t want to minimize people’s lived experience, and there definitely is portrayal of some of the challenges Patience faces, we wanted to make her less ‘other.’ We wanted her to talk and dress and interact and behave in a way that was less easy to distinguish [from people who are neurotypical]. We definitely wanted her to be less visibly different. That was the goal, and I think once we cast Ella, her performance brings that to life.

“Often, when you’re writing for a show, you have to be quite specific about character reactions, you’ve got to signpost stuff quite specifically for actors, so that they’re very clear about what it is that you’re trying to hit with a scene or whatever. With this, we probably stepped back a little, because we knew that Ella was going to bring her own lived experience to the character, and that she would bring it to life in a way through her own reactions, and how she interpreted some of the stage directions, and I think that’s proved to be true. She’s such a luminous performer, but it’s also a performance that comes from an authentic place.

“She would say, ‘I’m not Patience, I’m very different. My experience is very different, but I can relate to a lot of the things that she goes through.’ Obviously, it’s quite a big difference between us and the original, so as a writer, it’s something you want to lean into, the fact that you have an actor who is portraying a character who has shared experiences. Ella’s up in York, doing Season 2, and I’m trying not to put words into her mouth, I’m just relaying what I’ve heard her say.”

Did Purvis have a lot of interaction with the writers’ room?

“Yes, she did. I have to be slightly careful as a writer not to cede too much control to the actors, because at the end of the day, it’s got to be your interpretation. You’ve got to own what’s going to be onscreen. But there was definitely interaction on particular facets of character and plotline.

“In the original, Astrid has this moment across an episode where she thinks one of the guys working forensics might be interested in her, and there’s a little frisson, and then it goes away, because she reads a book and she decides she doesn’t fancy him.

“We leaned into that much more, and it was partly Ella’s inspiring the idea of, well, why can’t people with an autism diagnosis, who are neurodivergent, have relationships, and why can’t people portray that onscreen? And we ended actually going further down that route than perhaps we originally anticipated, to the point where something happens between her and Elliot [Tom Lewis], and it actually becomes a bigger storyline as we go forward.

“So, it’s an example of [Purvis being] very good in challenging some of the inherent biases that even a group of writers who have a lot of firsthand experience of people in their families with autism or have personal experience of it bring to the table.”

While Baker says he is not, so far as he knows, neurodivergent, “all the other writers either have a diagnosis or have a very close relative who has a diagnosis of some form of neurodivergence. In all three cases, we’re talking about female autism, which is obviously very relevant in this case.

“So, it was tremendously helpful and it was quite a big part of our process initially, talking about breaking down the different facets of what it’s like to have [a neurodivergent] diagnosis, and then trying to map those across the crimes [in the episodes], and work out at what point these facets of the condition would be disadvantageous, and at what potential moments it might be advantageous.”

For instance, Baker elaborates, “Quite a lot of people with autism have very strong sensory sensitivity to different forms of stimulus. So, we’ve got Patience very strongly reacting to cigar smoke in a scenario where she doesn’t expect to find it, and that’s a clue that helps unlock an insight that’s part of a criminal process. It’s small things like that which we can sort of build into moments, either positive or negative, for the character.”

As far as constructing the cases Patience and Co. are solving, the outlines are mostly taken from the French original. “Generally, the advantage of working from an adaptation rather than from scratch is that you get to reuse the framework of the original crime story, so it does cut down the time quite a lot.

“I’ve just finished writing a new crime procedural for Britbox in the U.S. called A TASTE FOR MURDER. I’ve had to make up all of the murders, the crimes of the week, myself, the crimes of the week myself, and I can vouch from personal experience that it’s very time-consuming and it’s quite challenging,” Baker laughs. “So, when you’ve got good source material to work from, as much as possible, you try and utilize it.”

Nevertheless, the approach is slightly different. “I think French audiences are possibly a little bit more forgiving than U.K. and U.S. audiences about whether the police follow the broad letter of the law when it comes to criminal procedure. So, if there were places where we felt the logic didn’t necessarily follow, or there was something that bumped against cultural viewpoints, we would spend quite a lot of time rebuilding, changing aspects of the crime. I’d hate people to think we just imported the whole thing unquestioningly. We do a lot of work on the crime stories, but it’s definitely easier to have some key dimensions of that crime story in place before we start writing.”

And what would Baker most like people to get out of PATIENCE?

“First and foremost, I would like people to be entertained by it. I think obviously a lot of the critical response is focused on the fact that the lead character is a young autistic woman, and that’s still quite a rare perspective to see as the lead character in a TV drama, although there are obviously portrayals out there.

“But I didn’t set out to write a drama about autism, I set out to write a crime procedural that happened to have a lead character who has this dimension to her character, and to say it’s a dimension, it’s not the thing that defines her whole character.

“So, in the process of people being entertained, I do think there is food for thought in the series about the differences that exist between people, between all of us, and how we interact with each other, and what the costs of that are, and what the upsides of [acceptance] are to society more broadly. So, it’s fileted in there, hopefully quite subtly, but there’s definitely some social messaging under the cover of an entertaining procedural.”

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Article: Exclusive Interview with PATIENCE Head Writer Matt Baker on Season 1 of the PBS crime procedural

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