Based on the series of books by Michael Connelly, who also acts as a creator of the series.
Bosch is another of the latest batch of Amazon pilot test episodes and is based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling book series. Due to this ‘Bosch’ has an advantage in that the characters are already rounded out before they were adapted to the screen. It’s a cop drama so some tropes just have to be there, Bosch (Titus Welliver – Sons of Anarchy, Lost) is a driven, veteran detective with a young fashion conscious partner (Jamie Hector – Max Payne, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai).
Bosch lives for the job to the extent that when he’s taken off the homicide rotation while he contests a civil trial for the fatal shooting of a serial killer, he bribes his way onto it again and gets sent on a ‘bone run’, where a retired doctor has found a bone and believes it to be human (The doctor is played by the legendary Scott Wilson! Seen most recently as Hershel in The Walking Dead).
He reveals that the bone is that of a child, no more than 13 years old and there’s evidence of previous physical abuse.
With the aid of the doctors dog, Bosch finds the burial site and spends his evening persuading his commander, ex-girlfriend and others to let him investigate. So now Bosch who isn’t supposed to be working cases at all finds himself trying to investigate the homicide of a child while avoiding the radar of superiors, the press and opposing counsel.
Bosch has a lot of advantages over it’s competition, it’s characters are well developed, while certain tropes are there they aren’t shoved in your face as blatantly as those in The After for example, the story is a good detective story, by the end of the episode we know just enough for us to want to find out more.
There isn’t a bad actor in this, in fact there are some truly great ones, the production values here are superb, perhaps because it is based on a novel series I find it closer to the style of True Detective than a standard police procedural. If Amazon are only going to produce one drama series out of the current batch I’d honestly pick this one over Chris Carters The After, which seems to be relying on Chris Carters reputation to sell the pilot while Bosch is using great story telling, acting and production values.
That said I’m a sucker for a good mystery.
4 out of 5 Nerds
Irwin Fletcher
I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.
Nerd Comments