I Watch TV: Bosch: Legacy

Bosch: Legacy

At the end of the last season of Bosch, Harry Bosch quit the LAPD to become a private investigator. Meanwhile his daughter, Maddie Bosch, quit law school to join the LAPD. So they took the opportunity to re-tool the series, putting it out under a different name.

They changed a few other things in the structure of the show. As well as a new theme song, in old Bosch, only Harry’s face was seen in the credits. Now there’s four, Harry, Maddie, lawyer Honey Chandler, and Mo, Bosch’s tech guy.

The Tech Guy and The Lawyer cover a lot of the ground where in previous Bosch he could rely on the Police Department. I had hoped he might struggle a little more without the institution to back him up, but when we first see him, perhaps a year into his private investigator career, he seems to have worked out the rougher parts. He can no longer depend on the cops, he also isn’t bound by the rules and makes up for it that way.

Despite not seeming to advertise he’s not doing badly either; we discover him breaking into someone’s house to recover keepsakes. It turns out the guy was the ex- of the daughter of the forensic anthropologist who turned up a few times in Bosch. Meanwhile the hedge fund guy who tried to have Maddie and Honey Chandler killed in the last season gets a hung jury and no retrial, so Bosch goes to work for Chandler on this, who is recovering from being shot. She’s at a new law firm, and as a main character also takes on the case of a homeless man who is accused of killing a popular local doctor, employing Bosch on the case. Meanwhile when he needs legal back up for his other case, seeking out a dying billionaire’s heir, she’s the one he goes to.

Maddie is now a rookie cop with the LAPD, something that is both familiar and different to the process we may have seen in the show The Rookie. In The Rookie, cops are, for the most part, people doing their job and living their lives who sometimes screw up and occasionally have to be heroes. In Bosch: Legacy cops are people doing their job who care about getting through the day and not appearing too bad, trying not to get in trouble with their superior. We’re introduced to Maddie chasing and catching a suspect, and her Training Officer writes her up for splitting up (as they would in The Rookie) and takes the credit for the arrest (which they probably wouldn't as a rule). This continues, with every bit of actual policing she’s involved with being needing to be cleaned up or chased up or generally grinding down the possibilities.

It's not any less noir-inflected than before, but Bosch as a PI simply hasn’t changed that much, and Maddie being so junior, she doesn’t make compromises, she just has to accept them, so it feels less so to me. It’s just the vibes, there’s an inheritance and a cover-up, it’s the same show in its bones. For a while it looked like there would be less murder now Bosch isn’t a homicide detective, but basically all three of his cases someone gets killed. And Maddie’s two main storylines are a murder and a rape, so it’s pretty violent. Also Bosch blows up a pipeline and fights a hitman (who is a woman). But in between there’s some good detective work, he’s using his charm and his wits to make up for the fact he can’t drag someone into a room and throw questions at them.

At least not legally.

Sadly for the show it throws away all my goodwill at the end. Not the dangling threads, the enemies left standing, how Bosch almost burns a bridge. That’s fine, in fact the show has always acknowledged that we’re in media res, that Bosch’s life and cases aren’t done and gone in one season. But they leave a full-on cliffhanger, something that demands to be resolved – or moved on – that same night. This sucks, and fortunately it had already been renewed before it went out which mitigates my annoyance slightly.

Watch This: More good, noir-flavoured crime drama, in a gritty Los Angeles
Don’t Watch This: Too violent, too corrupt and that damn cliffhanger