Bosch : Season 1

Review : Bosch Season 1

Aired on : Amazon (2015-)

My Rating : 7 out of 10

How many more police dramas do we need? Based on the success of the shows in past, and currently going on, I guess a lot more. There is a lot of appetite for this genre. And how many of those should be focused on serial killers? If you combine all the serial killers that have appeared so far in all the books, TV shows and movies, together their victim count perhaps exceeds a quarter of US population. But the books keep coming, and the Movies and TV shows keep exploiting the same genre over and over again. As long as it makes money, this will go on.

Once in a while, some output in this steady pipeline is worth writing about. Amazon Prime’s Bosch is one of them. If I had to write a single sentence review, then I would have chosen the phrase “Cliched, but solid”. With that summary, let’s look at the details.

Bosch, the series, is based on a few novels by Michael Connelly, in which Detective Harry Bosch is the central character. I haven’t read many novels by Connelly. On my book reviews, there is a review of his one novel, Brass Verdict,  but that features his other creation, Lincoln Lawyer. Connelly is a very successful writer, and a good writer. He is deeply involved in the TV production as well.

The series begins with Bosch being investigated, and eventually cleared for fatally shooting a suspect. Then the main story begins with the discovery of bones in a remote wooded area. The death, of a young boy, appears to be a murder happened more than a decade ago. While Bosch (Titus Welliver) starts to work on a cold case, a person named Reynard Waits (Jason Gedrick) gets picked up by police when they discover a dead body in his van. By all indications, Waits seems to have a lot of past secrets, and lot of darkness. These two threads, the murder investigation and Waits get linked via Bosch. While this is happening, Bosch gets romantically involved with a subordinate, a rookie officer Julia Brasher (Annie Wersching, from 24). Bosch has an ex-wife and a daughter, who also feature in the story. Incidentally, Bosch’s ex-wife Eleanor is played by Sarah Clarke, another 24 alumni. All these plot lines around Bosch make the cliches far more interesting than the run of the mill police shows. His past is explained well, and was essential to completing his character, and is very relevant to the story.

Not to forget, there is department politics, and interesting alliance between the police chief and a politician who wants to be the next mayor. As interesting as that is, the word that will come to a viewer’s mind, is “filler”. Those scenes are orthogonal to the story and if not for a lengthy TV series, would have been completely eliminated.

I am of course not going to divulge any more details about how the investigation proceeds. But I will say this. It’s a combination of mostly good and a bit of bad, things that mostly make sense and occasional things that don’t. Some coincidences and stupidity from characters was needed to advance the plot. Fortunately, this is a minor flaw, and overall the story doesn’t have many flaws.

As a mystery it works really well. Keeps you guessing for most part. All the lead characters have acted well. Titus Welliver of course gets the most screen time in the title role. His portrayal is very believable. This Harry also does not entirely play by the books, but is much more realistic than Dirty Harry. I enjoyed the Clint Eastwood movies as well, this is just a comparative statement on the style.

It’s a very good series to watch, not great. Since it’s available on streaming as 10 episodes of 45 mins each, it’s quite binge-able. It’s not for kids and is correctly rated TV-MA.