I first started watching Bosch just after I’d moved to the UK in 2018. Maneuvering a new job and a brand-new baby, my son just five months old, I was desperately homesick for the soothing, paint-by-numbers cop procedurals that only Americans know how to make. My husband and I started Bosch, which stars Titus Welliver as a rumpled LAPD cop with a salt-and-pepper, five o’clock shadow and gravelly voice, almost as a joke. There was something so immediately camp about the show that it threatened to topple over into parody. Harry Bosch is a by-the-book officer who also goes rogue sometimes, determined to get at the truth at any cost, with certain ethical lines etched in steel and some made to be blurred: “everybody counts, or nobody counts,” is his frequent refrain.
But then Bosch’s deliberately staccato rhythm, its achingly sedate structure and dusty LA vistas, all-but hypnotized me. Bosch is slow-TV for crime fans. It’s as much about the peeling strip malls and back alleys of Hollywood as the peeping toms and armed robbers that occupy them. It’s about Bosch’s heartbreakingly perfect, 360 degree views of the city from his glass-walled house in the Hollywood Hills, his mid-century furniture, mint collection of jazz LPs and the brown liquor he downs while listening to Monk, Coltrane and Davis. It’s about the kind of middle-aged man who still pays for everything in cash and brags about reading the constitution, “cover to cover.”
By day, I was caught up in the electric thrum of capitalism, commuting to an open-concept central London office amidst a throng of bodies, lonely and bored and overworked, scrolling my phone and trying to remember how I got here, a million miles away from a familiar face. At exactly five PM, I would rush to my son’s daycare hoping to avoid the 20-pound-a-minute late fees and then spend the rest of the evening, covered in sweat and breastmilk until bedtime.
But at night, after the baby was asleep, I’d watch Bosch and feel my existential panic dissipate for the next 47 minutes or so.
Watching Harry Bosch and his partner Jerry Edgar (Jamie Hector) drive across east Hollywood or unwind at Musso & Frank’s was like a psychic balm. This wayward detective, methodically and patiently dissecting the task ahead of him, seemed so in control of his own time, his own fate, that I started to wonder why I was always so incapable of grasping my own. Time, in those days, felt like a slippery rock, something I was desperately trying to hold, but inevitably dropping in an ocean of responsibilities and demands. Sound dramatic? Imagine how my husband felt when I wondered if I should quit journalism and become a cop, or was I just fooling myself about the level of real estate LAPD officers can afford these days?
Instead, I quit my job. And now there’s a new iteration of the show, the magnificently-titled Bosch: Legacy. Don’t worry: Harry Bosch (now a private investigator) and his universe remain frozen in amber in a way that stoically preserves the charm and grit of the original series, while bringing a new cast of secondary characters to the fore. His daughter Maddy (Madison Lintz) is the titular legacy as a new LAPD trainee, or “boot,” who suffers from the same insubordination and unfettered zeal as her decorated dad.
The original Bosch series is often written up as “under-the-radar” when it’s not ignored altogether in favor of more prestige crime fare. But thanks to its devoted fans, it’s the most popular series that Amazon Prime has produced, running through seven seasons before this spinoff. Perhaps, as it ambles across familiar terrain, this new version will give both the Bosch zealot and the Bosch-curious an opportunity to wade into the show’s nostalgic noir universe. Please, give yourself a chance to linger in the melancholic stupor of Harry Bosch’s LA.
But if you quit your job as a result, please don’t blame it on me.