Bosch (TV series)

Bosch
Genre	Detective fiction Drama
Created by	Michael Connelly
Developed by	Eric Overmyer
Starring	Titus Welliver Jamie Hector Amy Aquino Lance Reddick Annie Wersching Sarah Clarke Jason Gedrick Madison Lintz Jeri Ryan Brent Sexton
Opening theme	"Can't Let Go" by Caught A Ghost
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	2
No. of episodes	20 (list of episodes)
Production
Cinematography	Eric Alan Edwards
Running time	50 minutes
Release
Original network	Amazon Video
Original release	February 6, 2014 (2014-02-06) – present
External links
Website

Bosch is an American police procedural web television series produced by Amazon Studios. It stars Titus Welliver as Los Angeles Police detective Harry Bosch. The show was developed for Amazon by Eric Overmyer^[1] and the first season takes its inspiration from three of Michael Connelly’s novels: City of Bones, Echo Park, and The Concrete Blonde.

It is one of two drama pilots that Amazon streamed online in early 2014. Viewers were allowed to offer their opinions about the pilot before the studio decided whether to place a series order.^[2] On March 12, 2014, Amazon.com ordered a full season to appear on Amazon Prime, and the season premiered on February 13, 2015.^[3]

On March 18, 2015, Bosch was renewed for a second season,^[4] which takes inspiration from Connelly's novels Trunk Music, The Drop, and The Last Coyote.^[5] The second season premiered on March 11, 2016.

On April 1, 2016, Bosch was renewed for a third season, which will adapt Connelly's novel The Black Echo and elements of A Darkness More Than Night.^[6] Bosch was renewed for Season 3 by Amazon in June 2016 and is projected to return in the Fall of 2016 or Spring of 2017.^[7] On October 16, 2016, Bosch was renewed for a fourth season.^[8]

Plot

Season 1

As the pilot opens, Bosch is tailing a suspect. Eventually cornering him in an alley, Bosch shoots the suspect when he reaches in his pocket. The incident is shown later in the episode in two separate flashbacks. When seen from Bosch's point of view it appears that there is something in the suspect's hand that falls in a puddle. When the incident is recounted by the plaintiff's lawyer during a wrongful death suit, there is clearly nothing in the suspect's hand and Bosch is shown planting a gun. Whatever really happened, he is cleared by the department. The show fast-forwards to two years later where Bosch is being sued by the family of the suspect in a wrongful death civil suit.

Feeling that he has to do something as a police officer, he agrees to trade with two other detectives to take the weekend shift, where he is called out on a case which turns out to be a suicide, and a second case where a doctor reports his dog found a human bone in the woods.

The bone leads to more bones and the coroner determines the skeleton is that of a small boy who was horribly abused and beaten, then buried in the woods. The boy has been dead since at least 1989, and could have been anything from 10 to 12 when he died, but was so horribly treated that it is not certain exactly how old he was. The details of the boy's mistreatment – more than 40 broken bones, some having healed while others were relatively recent – and his death are so grisly that Bosch has to step away and go into the restroom to splash water on his face and sit down on a commode for a moment to regain his composure.

Production

Amazon Studios announced on October 31, 2013 that it had given the green light to Bosch for production. The hour-long pilot starred Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch, with Annie Wersching, Amy Price-Francis, and Jamie Hector co-starring. Henrik Bastin of Fabrik Entertainment was the producer and Jim McKay directed.^[9]

According to Connelly, "a fair amount of changes" were made "to the world of Harry Bosch" "in making the shift from page to screen." In the series, Harry "is 47 years old and a veteran of the first Gulf War in 1991," when he was a member of a Special Forces team clearing tunnels, but "he has now been a police officer for twenty years, with a one-year exception when he re-upped with the Army after 9/11, as many LAPD officers did. He came back to the force after serving in Afghanistan and again encountering tunnel warfare."^[10]

On November 4, 2013, the 13-day shoot began in Los Angeles, while Connelly kept a daily set journal.^[11]

The pilot premiered on Amazon Prime in February 2014 to allow customers to vote to decide if more episodes should be made.^[12] In March 2014, Amazon announced that they had commissioned Bosch for a full series.^[13]

All ten episodes of the first season of Bosch were released for viewing on Amazon Video on February 13, 2015.^[14] Portions of the first episode were changed from the pilot, including the addition of Mimi Rogers to the cast to replace Amy Price-Francis as plaintiff's attorney Honey Chandler and the addition of a scene in which Bosch testifies in court and is questioned about his background by Chandler.

On March 18, 2015, Bosch was renewed for a second season.^[4] On July 16, the series was nominated for the Outstanding Main Title Design award at the 67th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards, along with Manhattan, American Horror Story: Freak Show, Daredevil, Halt and Catch Fire, and Olive Kitteridge; the award was won by Manhattan.^[15]

Cast

Main cast

Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch

• Titus Welliver as Los Angeles Police Department Detective III Hieronymus 'Harry' Bosch, a homicide detective in the Hollywood Division. Something of a renegade, Harry is an astute detective with a fundamental respect for rules and policy. Harry lives in a house on stilts in the Hollywood Hills, purchased with money he earned as a technical advisor on a film.
• Jamie Hector as Det. II Jerry Edgar, Harry's partner
• Amy Aquino as Lieutenant II Grace Billets, Harry's immediate superior and his friend
• Lance Reddick as Deputy Chief Irvin Irving, West Bureau Commanding Officer
• Sarah Clarke as Eleanor Wish, Harry's ex-wife, with whom he still has a cordial, if tense, relationship

Season 1

• Annie Wersching as Officer Julia Brasher, a rookie cop assigned to the Hollywood Division. She becomes involved with Harry, but comes into conflict with him when he realizes she makes up the rules as she goes along.
• Jason Gedrick as Raynard Waits, a serial killer and the suspect in the death of a boy whose bones are found in Laurel Canyon

Season 2

• Madison Lintz as Maddie Bosch (recurring season 1), Harry's teenaged daughter. She has a close, loving relationship with her father.
• Jeri Ryan as Veronica Allen, a manipulative former porn star married to an Armenian porn producer who is murdered.
• Brent Sexton as Carl Nash, a corrupt LAPD Homicide Detective, now retired, who oversees a team of villainous police officers while working as a security guard at the estate where the Allens live.

Recurring cast

• Scott Klace as Sgt. John Mankiewicz, a Sergeant and Assistant Watch Commander at the Hollywood Division station
• Steven Culp as Richard 'Rick' O'Shea, the politically ambitious Los Angeles County District Attorney
• Troy Evans as Det. Johnson (Barrel), a senior homicide detective at Hollywood Division
• Gregory Scott Cummins as Det. Moore (Crate), Barrel's longtime friend and partner
• Robbie Jones as Off. George Irving, Deputy Chief Irving's son, a rookie cop later assigned to undercover narcotics
• Deji LaRay as Off. Julius Edgewood
• DaJuan Johnson as Off. Rondell Pierce
• Mimi Rogers as Honey 'Money' Chandler, a civil rights attorney
• Jason Sims-Prewitt as Off. Victor Rhodes

Season 1

• Scott Wilson as Dr. Paul Guyot, a retired doctor whose dog found bones of a missing boy.
• Alan Rosenberg as Dr. William Golliher, a forensic anthropologist who assisted Bosch with the identification of the bones
• Mark Derwin as Captain Harvey Pounds
• Abraham Benrubi as Rodney Belk, a lawyer who represented Bosch in his trial.
• Paul Vincent O'Connor as Judge Alan M. Keyes, a judge who presided at Bosch's trial.
• Adam O'Byrne as Nate Tyler, an aggressive LA Times reporter
• Veronica Cartwright as Janet Saxon, Reynard Waits' mother
• Rose Rollins as Det. Kizmin Rider
• Shawn Hatosy as Johnny Stokes

Season 2

• Matthew Lillard as Luke 'Lucky' Rykov, an undercover FBI asset running a strip club in Las Vegas that is connected to the Russian mob
• Erika Alexander as Connie Irving, Deputy Chief Irving's wife and Off. Irving's mother
• James Ransone as Off. Eddie Arceneaux, Off. Irving's partner, involved in the ring of dirty cops led by Carl Nash
• Leisha Hailey as Off. Maureen 'Mo' O'Grady, also a cop in Nash's ring
• Emilia Zoryan as Layla, the stagename of a dancer at Dolly's in Las Vegas, Nevada and mysterious girlfriend to an Armenian porn producer who is murdered.

Episodes

Reception

Reviews of Bosch have been generally positive. Metacritic gives the series a score average of 71 (out of 100) based on 16 critics.^[16]

Cory Barker of TV.com wrote that the series is "rock-solid and generally enjoyable without ever making much of an attempt to push boundaries," and praised Amazon Studios for "producing a show based on a book that somehow reproduces the experience of reading." ^[17]

Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times wrote that, despite an "impossibly long" "list of brooding, taciturn small-screen police detectives," Bosch "proves gripping" because its "plotting and pacing...draw you in...like a good page-turner." ^[18]

Noel Murray of the A.V. Club remarked that "the best thing about Bosch is how well it captures Connelly’s Los Angeles," while noting that "the series’ biggest stumbling block is that it’s stubbornly slow-paced" despite the fact that "the slow-drip approach makes sense." ^[19]

Brian Lowry of Variety wrote that "the series has the texture and tone of an old-fashioned detective yarn," but said that "the transition from page to screen ... proves too talky in places and clunky in others". He remarked that the show boasted "good casting and a strong sense of L.A. noir", but opines that the series "feels undercooked".^[20]

Hank Stuever of The Washington Post called Welliver's performance "nicely built out of smirks and smolders," and wrote that the show's "unvarnished, unglamorous L.A. is a far more intriguing, far more complex setting for a story."^[21]

Brian Moylan of The Guardian praised the "noir" feeling of the show and considered it a step above NCIS, but did not like the similarities to too many other cop shows, calling the series "samey."^[3]

References

External links

• Bosch at the Internet Movie Database