So after ten seasons the trials and tribulations of Harry Bosch have drawn to a close, with the final episodes of Bosch: Legacy dropping on Amazon Prime just this past week. Fans of the series won’t have to wait too long for something to fill the gap, as the tenth and final episode of Bosch: Legacy season three, entitled ‘Dig Down’, effectively served as a backdoor pilot for the Bosch author Michael Connelly’s new series which will be centred around the detective Renée Ballard. Starring Maggie Q in the title role, the spinoff series is set to land on Amazon Prime this summer and will reportedly feature Titus Welliver as Bosch in at least a few episodes.
Still for longtime viewers the end of a beloved series can leave a chasm. And while Bosch may seem to possess many of the conventional elements of a police procedural or crime drama, the distinct tenor of the show may prove difficult to match, with the spinoff already essential viewing for anybody who wants to catch up on Welliver in his defining role, but likely to experience its own growing pains especially if Amazon retain the more frugal approach which marked the three seasons of Bosch: Legacy.
Bosch may not appear on many critics’ lists of the best shows and if it counts as prestige television it perhaps does so by default, as the first and longest-running original drama series on Amazon. Yet even if the audience skewed old, those who cherished the show did so for a variety of reasons from Welliver’s endearingly rugged and sometimes searingly intimate portrayal of the dogged Harry Bosch to its pragmatic portrayal of police work to the sunken glamour and seedy underbelly of its hometown Los Angeles. Along with its strong characters and stellar cast, by my reckoning the vibe of the show was its biggest asset and is a slippery thing to catch, a product here of the show’s commitment to location shooting in both distinctive and overlooked parts of Los Angeles, its brooding nighttime atmospherics, Bosch’s own modernist pad in the Hollywood Hills, a cantilevered structure which gazes out over the city, and his fondness for jazz by the likes of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Billy Strayhorn and Art Pepper.
That atmosphere or vibe sets it apart from other procedurals or crime dramas from Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire to narrower Los Angeles fare like The Shield or Southland. In fact for those who are less concerned with whodunnits, the intricacies of detective work or life on the beat the moody rhythms and slower tempos of Bosch make otherwise disparate benchmarks like Twin Peaks and The Sopranos well worthy of a recommendation, while True Detective and Mare of Easttown will scratch plenty of itches and come highly regarded though for this viewer their penchant for philosophising and small-town chicanery lands them just wide of the mark.
As someone who watched all ten seasons of Bosch pretty much as they aired and ranks the show right up there as one of my favourites, here’s what I’d recommend to fellow aficionados in need of a fix . . .
The Wire
Up there with The Sopranos as the seminal work of a new ‘golden age’ of television, Bosch shares a certain lineage with The Wire as the show was developed for Amazon by Eric Overmyer, a frequent David Simon collaborator who served as a full-time writer and producer on The Wire during its fourth season.
Bosch therefore reconnected Overmyer with Lance Reddick and Jamie Hector, two of the stars of The Wire as the police lieutenant turned major turner commissioner turned defence lawyer Cedric Daniels and the young and exceedingly violent drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield. The relationship between Daniels and Jimmy McNulty on The Wire is not dissimilar to the relationship between Bosch and Chief Irving, who share a begrudging respect which at times verges upon fondness while frequently butting heads. And beyond the crime element and their shared focus on detective work, Bosch primarily through the character of Chief Irving dealt with the wider political machinations of the Los Angeles Police Department, though while The Wire offered a systemic dissection of institutional power Bosch tended to paint in broader strokes with its political dynamics more character-based.
Meanwhile the talented and somewhat inscrutable Hector plays Bosch’s partner Jerry Edgar, a role which deepens over the course of the series and is considerably expanded from Edgar’s appearances in Michael Connelly’s books. If the show Edgar proves a steadfast companion while suffering from his own inner conflicts, in Bosch it is the wary and perilously fraught relationship between Harry and Santiago ‘Jimmy’ Robertson which reminds me of the fateful collision between Stringer Bell and Marlo Stanfield in season three of The Wire.
Deadwood
Fans of Titus Welliver should embrace the near distant past, namely in the form of Deadwood and its circumlocutory tale of chaos and civilisation on the American frontier. The HBO drama features Welliver in one of his signature roles as Silas Adams, a debt collector from Yankton turned associate or underling of Al Swearengen at the notorious Gem Saloon, and some of the bitterness of Adams who suffers lust and betrayal at the hands of Miss Isringhausen finds its way into Bosch who endures his own pangs of loneliness or might snarl with anger at some transgression which seems certain to derail a case.
Some of that anxious or overbearing anger is also manifest in the figures of such Deadwood luminaries as Swearengen, Cy Tolliver, Seth Bullock and George Hearst. Aside from its own revolving drama and bawdy humour, the inestimable Deadwood also serves as an entryway to David Milch’s generous and linguistically ornate yet still turbulent universe, with NYPD Blue and Brooklyn South – co-created by Milch and Steven Bochco – both featuring Welliver in breakout roles.
The Shield
Squatting atop the field of Los Angeles-based cop shows, compared to The Sopranos and The Wire the rogue FX drama The Shield pulls no punches. Eschewing slow builds and the brooding quality of Bosch, from the outset The Shield is all wham, bam and thank you ma’am. At once overtly retrograde even for the early aughties yet musically and thematically very much of its time, The Shield turned our notions of the antihero into overdrive or into the red with the character of Vic Mackey not only boldly corrupt but murderously violent even in the pilot episode, a kind of brutality to which he was prone whenever he felt himself in a fight for survival.
A forebear to shows like Breaking Bad and Ozark for its burrowing corruption and seedy fatalism, over seven seasons The Shield offers an especially intense depiction of life on the beat, originally based on the real-life Rampart scandal. But the show is more than a big brute tour de force, as it explores with deftness and a certain prescience such themes as closeted homosexuality and sexual assault while its family dynamics stretch beyond the loaded dependencies of the Strike Team, to incorporate keen portrayals of marital strife and the struggles of child rearing, particularly when two of Vic’s children are diagnosed with autism.
Justified
In the neo-Western crime drama Justified the lead actor Timothy Olyphant – who played the pent-up and sometimes searingly indignant Sheriff Bullock in Deadwood – gets to show off a broader and more sardonic type of charisma. As deputy marshal Raylan Givens he treads a precarious line between his duties and colleagues at the federal courthouse on the one hand and on the other the criminal element of run-down Harlan County, the place where he grew up and hoped to have left for good.
In fact Justified and Bosch open through a similar framing device or premise, as in the opening scenes of both shows it is established that Raylan and Harry have been involved in a fatal shooting while on duty, with the ensuing controversy forcing Raylan from his post in Miami back to Kentucky, while for Harry a civil case dredges up painful memories from his past. And just like Bosch with his love for mid-century jazz and his resolutely old-school mentality, Raylan feels like a man out of time with his cowboy hat a relic of the Old West though he possesses all of the wit and gumption necessary to thrive in the present.
Like with Harry in Bosch, the action in Justified to a large extent revolves around Raylan Givens and by the second season – and the introduction of Margo Martindale as the monstrous Mags Bennett – the show shares the same format of season-long arcs. If the prominence of Olyphant and Walton Goggins makes Justified somewhat of a cross between Deadwood and The Shield then Bosch could be described as a cross between Deadwood and The Wire owing to the presence of Welliver, Hector and Reddick, which works well enough as a recommendation or tagline without perhaps capturing the show’s precise tenor.
NCIS: Los Angeles
There’s a plethora of network dramas which might get little love from the critics but are watched resolutely by so-called Middle America, and while some of the disdain is well justified owing to their glib plots and scarcely veiled propaganda, I’m a big fan of NCIS: Los Angeles which by the end of its first season had sloughed off the cod psychology which plagues some of these shows and found rare chemistry in the couplings of its cast, which featured Chris O’Donnell as G. Callen and LL Cool J as Sam Hanna, a durable and charismatic lead pair, the slow-burning romance of Daniela Ruah as Kensi Blye and Eric Christian Olsen as Marty Deeks plus Renée Felice Smith as Nell Jones and Barrett Foa as Eric Beale, a couple of tech wizzes all of whom were overseen by Linda Hunt as Hetty Lange, the mostly earthbound investigatory crew’s diminutive operations manager.
The prominence of Hetty, Kensi and Nell, well-developed and well-rounded professional women, is matched in Bosch by the brilliant Amy Aquino as the lieutenant Grace Billets, by Mimi Rogers as the civil rights attorney Honey ‘Money’ Chandler and by Madison Lintz who plays Harry’s daughter Maddie Bosch, by the end of the series a fledgling police officer. Meanwhile in NCIS: Los Angeles the all-seeing and all-knowing Hettie is soon joined in a leadership role by Miguel Ferrer as Owen Granger, one of the few actors who could match and perhaps even surpass Titus Welliver for a kind of embattled gruffness or ruggedness.
For a network drama beholden to twenty-four episodes each season, NCIS: Los Angeles got through lots of location shooting, from the city’s beaches and streets to its restaurants, clubs and Hollywood mansions. The breezy vibe makes it a pleasant respite from more humdrum network or streaming fare, yet the show also developed several major and long-running plotlines, like the central mystery of Callen’s identity which had been lost as the character like Harry Bosch had spent much of his youth in the care system, in Callen’s case shuffled between foster homes where he bore witness to abuse while suffering his own beatings.
The Wire, The Shield and Justified each lasted between five and seven seasons while some of the other shows on this list were wrapped up within two or three. If you enjoy NCIS: Los Angeles however you’re in great luck because the show proved one of the longest-running dramas in television history, with 323 episodes over the course of its fourteen seasons before it drew to a close in the spring of 2023.
Bron (The Bridge)
If your defining image of Bosch is one of Harry gazing through the glass of his hillside home or leaning upon the balcony as he looks out over the throb and glow of the city, then perhaps the Swedish crime drama Bron or The Bridge is the show that best captures this moody and sometimes rueful, shadowy nighttime aesthetic.
One of the shows that prompted a vogue for Nordic noir – others include the archetypal Beck, a series of television movies which is approaching its third decade with Mikael Persbrandt as Gunvald Larsson a good analogue for a younger Harry Bosch, plus Wallander, The Killing and Trapped – Bron centres upon the travails of Saga Norén, a stubborn and intuitive homicide detective. Apparently autistic, which poses a unique set of challenges while honing the genre’s usual sense of a disconnect between its lead character and the outside world, like Bosch the solitary figure of Saga Norén is wracked by memories of the past, which in her case involves the death of her sister and the suggestion of abuse at the hands of their mother. Riven with alienation and addiction, grisly murders and unexpected prison stints before Saga casts her badge into the sea, Bron even more than Bosch embraces the darkness.
Tokyo Vice
The gleaming yet seedy or furtive city by night is no better rendered than in the films of Michael Mann, from Thief to Heat to Miami Vice, with the character of Eady in the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro thriller Heat sharing Bosch’s house in the hills of Hollywood. Another director who successfully captures that sleek and neon-clad vibe is Wong Kar-wai, through films like In the Mood for Love and Fallen Angels.
West meets east, the nexus of Heat and Fallen Angels or something like Memories of Murder or the Yakuza/Like a Dragon video game series is Tokyo Vice, which Mann executive produced while directing the pilot episode. Based on a memoir and subverting the usual formula as its central character Jake Adelstein is neither a criminal nor an officer of the law but an aspiring journalist, in Tokyo Vice the overzealous and decidedly flawed American expatriate Jake soon falls in with a hostess and members of the yakuza, drawing both himself and some of his colleagues and friends into extreme danger. The role is played winningly by Ansel Elgort alongside Rachel Keller and a cast of mostly Japanese actors like the illustrious Ken Watanabe and brooding newcomer Show Kasamatsu, and like Bosch depicts a world of corruption and vice which threatens to swallow one whole. It is stylish and sometimes riotously funny while pulling the viewer ever closer to its turbulent characters and enveloping drama.
On that last cinematic note, Bosch fans would surely also enjoy the classic works of film noir or neo-noir from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown, plus Ben Affleck’s directorial forays by way of the Boston-based crime thrillers Gone Baby Gone and The Town, both of which involve more Titus Welliver.
