Image via AMC
Published Feb 15, 2026, 10:00 PM EST
Michael John Petty is a Senior Author for Collider who spends his days writing, in fellowship with his local church, and enjoying each new day with his wife and daughters. At Collider, he writes features and reviews, and has interviewed the cast and crew of Dark Winds. In addition to writing about stories, Michael has told a few of his own. His first work of self-published fiction – The Beast of Bear-tooth Mountain – became a #1 Best Seller in "Religious Fiction Short Stories" on Amazon in 2023. His Western short story, The Devil's Left Hand, received the Spur Award for "Best Western Short Fiction" from the Western Writers of America in 2025. Michael currently resides in North Idaho with his growing family.
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Editor's note: The below interview contains spoilers for the Dark Winds Season 4 premiere.
Well, it's official. Dark Winds has been renewed for a fifth season ahead of the fourth season premiere, which is great news for those of us thrilled with the AMC neo-Western. With Lt. Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), and Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten) set for a plethora of new changes heading into Season 4, Collider had the pleasure of speaking with executive producer and showrunner John Wirth about the show's future — namely, why now was the time to head to Los Angeles, what Franka Potente's new villain brings to the show, and what audiences can expect in the coming weeks.
COLLIDER: After the team has been split apart over the last two seasons now — Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito [are] all back and finally reunited in Season 4 — how has their dynamic changed in the last few years, and why is now the right time to move them from the Navajo Nation to Los Angeles, at least temporarily?
JOHN WIRTH: That's a good question. I don't know if this was foreknowledge or after-knowledge, but given the circumstances of the way we started this season with Leaphorn's ruminations on retirement and then his thinking about succession... and who of those two [Chee and Manuelito] — because they do have the same rank in the police station, they do the same job. They have different backgrounds, law enforcement backgrounds, but I think Leaphorn thinks of them as being his lieutenants, "junior" lieutenants. So, his ruminations lead him to make a decision on who is going to succeed him, of those two, which is a great set-up for drama in a show like this. You've got multiple relationships there — Bern and Chee, Bern and Leaphorn, Leaphorn and Chee, Chee and Bern — so it's just a really good, juicy way to get into the inner workings of their relationship.
Taking them out of their environment, especially taking them to a place like Los Angeles, these people are... They're not hicks. They have lived in cities. Chee went to Berkley, he went to California, he lived in Los Angeles, as we find out this season. But they're Navajo people. And one thing I know about Navajo people, having learned it by working with a lot of Navajo people over the last five years, is [that] they are connected to the land in a way that I am not. I wear shoes all the time, I'm inside all the time. It's very unusual for me to spend a night outside or even six hours outside, unless I'm on location filming this TV show.
But the Navajo people are extremely connected, on an electrical way or something, to the world around them — the sky, the water, the air. It's really amazing. I'm making too big a deal out of it, of course, but it's amazing to be with them and talk with them about it. So, I think taking these three characters that are Navajo, that have that connection to their world, and yank them out of that world and put them in another world (which they are not comfortable in), add an element of danger, add an element of mistrust between the three of them because of what's happening (both in the succession story and in the ghost-sickness story), just made for good drama. It's just a really good situation for us to explore.
I had wanted to get off the reservation — first of all, in the novel, The Ghostway, they go to California, so it was kind of a no-brainer. That's where the idea came from initially. I thought, "Let's take this show to a place where the audience is maybe not expecting it to go and see what happens, and then return our people back to the place where the audience wants to see them, probably." At the end of the season, I was like, "I'm so glad to be back." It's just easier in some ways. You can die of exposure, but at least you'd be with your landscape.
John Wirth Teases 'Dark Winds' Season 4's Biggest Threat
Image via AMCThe big threat this season is Franka Potente's Irene Vaggan. What can you tell audiences about her? When we spoke on set, you compared her to Nicholas Logan's Colton Wolf, but what sets her apart as a Dark Winds antagonist?
WIRTH: She's a sociopath. And a psychopath. I mean, she's demented. I used to have fun with Franka; when I would see her, I would say, "Dr. Demento!" Because she plays that demented thing so successfully. She would tell you — and if you've spoken to her, I'm sure she has — that she likes playing the bad guys because they're interesting. They're weird and broken and dysfunctional. She loves playing those characters, and she really got her teeth into this character.
In the book, Vaggan was a man, and he was just too close to Colton Wolf. And I thought Nick [Logan] was spectacular as that character, and I just didn't want to bring in another big, hulking white dude to be the bad guy. We decided to make Vaggan a woman, and then there were lots of discussions of what kind of woman she would be, what kind of woman in 1972 would have that job. Was that even remotely realistic, even in the film and television business? And it was a little bit out on the edge, but giving her this background of having been raised in Germany during World War II, and her father was a Nazi, and her grandfather was a Nazi who is now living with her. And I just loved Udo's — R.I.P. [Udo Kier, who passed back in November] — performance as that character, and how she resolved her issues with him.
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Once we had that backstory in place — and we wrote a pretty specific, lengthy backstory for her — it really made sense that she would land in the Southwest. And, in the course of her work for this very urban gang leader — Dominic McNair, played by Titus Welliver, which was also incredibly thrilling to have him on the show — she goes to the reservation, and this is the place of her dreams. She had been fixated with Native Americans and the whole life of the Southwest and warriors. She had read all these books written by Karl May — who is a real novelist, still quite successful in Germany — [who] had written all of these books, fantasy books, about the Southwest and Native Americans in the Southwest that Europeans were reading at the time. It got her through the tough days of the war, and then her family emigrated to South America, and then they ended up in California, and suddenly, she finds herself on the reservation working and lays eyes on Joe Leaphorn — and there is the man of her dreams. The fantasy come to life. There he is in the flesh. From that moment on in the story, her obsession starts to build, and it plays out in a really kooky way, I thought.
'Dark Winds' Showrunner Reveals the Process Behind Choosing Which Book To Adapt Each Season
I actually have my copy of The Ghostway right here, and I was curious: What goes into choosing which Hillerman novel you adapt each year? How do you decide which parts you lean into and which you take out?
WIRTH: Well, that's a really good question. The novels are challenging to adapt. You know, there's a whole story of Hillerman writing the Joe Leaphorn book, the original novel [The Blessing Way], which he sold to Universal, and then he wrote the screenplay for a movie, and the movie did not get made. Then he went back to Albuquerque, or wherever he lived, I'm not quite sure, and wrote another Joe Leaphorn book and found out that he had lost the rights to the character because the movie studio owned it. So then he created Jim Chee. And then at some point, with the success of his novels, he got the rights to Joe Leaphorn back. So then, some of these books in the early books are Jim Chee novels, and then Leaphorn comes back in, and they become the Leaphorn & Chee novels.
In The Ghostway, Leaphorn is not really in that story. I had wanted to do the LA part of it, that's what attracted me to it, and so we just decided to do that story. It felt right in terms of my sort of circadian rhythm of what the show should be. In Season 2, Leaphorn wasn't in that novel [People of Darkness] either. The world of the novels and the world of the TV show are connected, but they're not mirror images of each other. We do a lot of invention to make the novels fit into our stories. In Season 3, we used two novels [Dance Hall of the Dead and The Sinister Pig] and kind of mashed them up because there were elements of The Sinister Pig that I liked a lot, and we had Bernadette leaving. It's just kind of a feel thing.
For Season 5, I had thought that we would do one novel, and then I got into some discussions about it with Zahn McClarnon, and he wasn't quite sold on the novel that I wanted to do. So, he recommended a couple of others. And so, I started to take a second look at the novels that he recommended, and then we ended up negotiating our way to the novel that we ended up using. He's influential in that as well, because he has to be the guy on screen, so he wants to be sure that we're making the right decision. And we're never sure because it's all a crapshoot. You just hope to get in an interview like this with a guy like you who says, "I loved the season!" You're like, "Oh, thank God."
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