Like all the talent I’ve had the fortune of interacting with at Telly Visions, writer is a warm and generous interviewee. Lead writer on Season 1 of , you no doubt also know him from his work on , , and , to name a few. Patience marks the fourth adapted series Baker has worked on and the first to feature a neurodiverse central character. Diverging somewhat from its source material (), Baker chose to focus heavily on Patience’s inner life, her home setting, and her backstory. It makes for a richly crafted character, one who is authentically portrayed both in front of the camera and behind the scenes.

Adapting a hit series into an English-language version takes a considered approach. Baker spoke about how any adaptation begins with an “honest assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the source material you're working with.” Baker recognized the popularity and praised the original series’ originality and character work. But he conceded that “you don't try and adapt something unless you think you can improve it.” 

He noted how some of the stories in Astrid followed a “slightly less rigorous logic than UK or US audiences expect from their police procedurals.” Baker compared the adaptation process to restoring an old building: “You keep the outer frame and the bits of it people love and recognize, but you can almost entirely remake the interior of the building, provided you do it sensitively.”

Comparing the two versions of the series, Baker notes how, as a character, Astrid was presented as “quite other” and extremely affected by her autism diagnosis, which played out in character interactions and Astrid’s potential for burnout. 

“You’re always wary of talking about spectrum when it comes to autism, but there are people who are more severely affected by an autism diagnosis, and there are some you might call high functioning. I think some of the portrayals of autism in popular culture have tended to slide up the scale a little bit. We saw the potential to do something authentic, but made the characters more relatable in some ways for neurotypical audiences.”

The writers took particular care in how to present Patience realistically and respectfully. Baker himself is not on the spectrum, but the show’s two original co-writers have an autism diagnosis and helped bring Patience to life through their lived experience. For Baker, working with co-writers was somewhat new but very rewarding. He was first teamed up with and , then later with when Freethy had to drop out of the process.

“Daniella had written one episode of  (another Walter Presents show). I’d come in towards the end and written with her on that, so I had a bit of [prior] experience. Sarah’s a novelist and doesn’t really have any background in TV, but crucially, both have very close, personal, first-hand experience of autism. All the other writers, including Stephen, either had an autism diagnosis themselves or had a close female relative with autism.”

“A lot of the initial process with Daniella and Sarah was desk research, talking through aspects of a diagnosis and how it might impact Patience’s world, how it might relate to criminology, etc. Specifically from a female point of view, because not that long ago, people didn’t think women got autism. It’s a less-understood dimension to the condition.”

Baker continued: “I don’t have that first-hand experience the character has, and to have other writers who could guide me was very useful.” There was a flow of collaboration, though more often, each writer did their own version of the episodes they worked on. Baker came in at the end and did a “big sweep up of all the episodes” to be sure the series had a consistency of voice. “The difficulty in writing as a group is the potential for tonal shifts,” Baker explained.

When I ask about the faithfulness of the first season to the source material, Baker points out that there were quite a few changes made. “We do strip away a lot of the background stories that were in the original, and we massively change Patience’s trajectory from Astrid’s. We did that very deliberately in a tight time format to explore the central issue of Patience and her neurodiversity, and how that affects her world.” 

That said, Baker acknowledges the benefits of starting from a framework for crime stories. “Coming up with murders, how a murderer would [kill] and get away with it, then trying to work out how the police would unpick that is quite a complicated and time-consuming process!”

A fan of crime procedurals, Baker watches them in his limited spare time with his wife, who also works in television. He just finished  on Netflix and really enjoyed it. But being a writer can bring limitations to the viewing experience. He often finds himself split with “one half of my brain watching professionally, and the other half watching just as a viewer.” He’s able to keep mysteries a surprise to himself by being good at “separating those two parts.” Still, he said, “living with somebody who works in the industry, my other half is always one step ahead of me,” and tends to spoil the endings for him.

Though I asked the burning question, fans will be disappointed to hear that not even Baker knows when the next season of Hotel Portofino will return. “I've got lots of thoughts about how to continue the story, and obviously we set it up with this great, dirty cliffhanger at the end of Season 3.” The “vagaries” of international television mean that only Eagle Eye Productions has those details.

Meanwhile, Patience is moving on with Season 2 – mostly without Baker, as he started working almost immediately on a new original series for BritBox called A Taste for Murder. Amidst a whirlwind of new writing, I wanted to know what kept him going and nurtured his creativity. His answer was strikingly simple and profound: Time to think. Baker explained how he came to writing late in life after corporate jobs at Paramount and Channel 4. While those jobs were high-profile, high-pressure environments, there were always “mental downtime moments” that disappear when you’re a full-time writer. “When you're writing on your own, there is no downtime. The creativity comes when you're not trying to push it.”

He talks about being purposeful, even on vacations, so he’s not always actively engaging his brain in reading or listening to a podcast. “If your brain is just idling along in neutral, that's often when things in the back start to connect. The best ideas often come when you're not actively looking for them. You spend so much time as a writer trying to think and that can be quite mentally exhausting. Letting go sometimes fires the synapses you've been trying to put together.”

The first season of Patience continues Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on PBS, the PBS App, PBS Passport, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. All six episodes are available for members to stream on PBS Passport starting from premiere day. Season 2 is expected to arrive in 2026.