I Watch TV: Bosch

Bosch

For complicated reasons I have occasional access to an Amazon Prime screen and there are a bunch of shows that have been recommended to me. Rather than any of them I instead went for the first season of Bosch which I had vaguely heard of. I’d somehow gained the impression that it was an American Scandi-noir or as we sometimes call it, California noir.

Well not quite. Harry Bosch is a homicide detective with the Los Angeles police. He’s being sued for killing a guy (this runs through the first 3 or 4 episodes before a verdict) and should be off the rota but swaps and picks up a cold case when a dog digs up some 20 year old bones.

These two bits put Bosch in the news, and when a serial killer, Reynard Waits, is arrested he sees it and claims he did the cold case murder. There are plenty of other suspects though. Waits inevitably escapes, which propels us into the politics of the show, where the District Attorney is running for Mayor by taking all the credit and blaming the cops for failures. The interlocking levels above Bosch – the lieutenant, the captain, the deputy chief all have their own arcs, some foreshortened – they were confident they’d make more or didn’t care that we only saw part of it. Bosch, of course, plays by his own rules, fast and loose with department policy. So do others, but in different ways, which Bosch then has to scramble to deal with until things get close to falling apart for him and another officer who he was dating (in violation of policy).

He never quite articulates why his skirting the regulations is okay but others aren’t. Still, basically he keeps leaving his partner to chase suspects and turning up at crime scenes he’s not part of, in order to catch bad guys; others do it to protect themselves, advance their careers or just because they can and want to get another minor arrest from a traffic stop to their credit.

Anyway, Bosch is played by Titus Welliver, whose name is an even better one for a noir detective than any of those in the show. As for the show itself, it’s a clever police drama, well acted, looks very good, and loses its clarity a little towards the end. Not quite noir? A classic California noir would have a crooked land deal and the cover ups would be bigger.

Watch This: For superior crime police drama
Don’t Watch This: If you want a crime police drama that does something very different