The Golden Age of Television was the best thing that ever happened to the police procedural. It was the best thing that happened to the entire medium of TV, but cop shows in particular got markedly better under the Golden Age. For decades, cop shows had been very rigid and formulaic, with very black-and-white morality and episodic storytelling that wrapped up every case in a neat bow. In Dragnet and Columbo and Police Woman, we saw good, honest officers of the law chasing down bad guys, catching their man, and putting them behind bars in time for the end credits.
But, after the Rodney King beating and the Rampart scandal, it became clear that that was an unrealistic Hollywood fantasy. After The Sopranos opened the door to a wave of morally gray antiheroes, Shawn Ryan subverted the police procedural with The Shield, a cop show about corrupt cops who only care about enriching and empowering themselves. In the very first episode of The Shield, we see our supposed protagonist murder one of his fellow boys in blue in cold blood.
David Simon turned his years of experience as a crime reporter in Baltimore into the definitive cop show. The Wire is the most realistic police procedural ever made. It doesn’t shy away from the horrors of police brutality, and it doesn’t follow the conventional case-of-the-week structure of a typical procedural like CSI or Law & Order; in some cases, it takes Jimmy McNulty and his team a full season (or even longer) to build a case against a notorious local drug lord like Avon Barksdale or Marlo Stanfield.
Gritty, subversive shows like The Wire and The Shield are great, but those traditional procedurals have their charm, too. Prime Video found the perfect middle ground with Bosch: it’s a grittier, more grounded take on a cop show, much like The Wire, but with a more traditional CSI-style procedural approach.
Bosch Is One Of The Best Cop Shows Of The 21st Century
Author Michael Connelly has created a sprawling literary universe full of shared characters and crossovers — it’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe for lovers of crime fiction — and he’s mostly explored that world through the eyes of Mickey Haller, a criminal defense attorney who works out of the back of a Lincoln Navigator, and Harry Bosch, a grizzled L.A.P.D. detective. The former is the star of his own show on Netflix, The Lincoln Lawyer, but the latter is the star of an even better show on Prime Video, simply titled Bosch.
While the filmmaking has the grit and edge and atmosphere of something like The Wire or The Shield or Line of Duty, the writing is refreshingly old-school. It’s an old-school cop show in the same way that The Pitt is an old-school medical drama. TV feels like TV again, and it’s nice. The whole series is anchored by Titus Welliver’s magnetic charisma. He ripped the character of Bosch straight off the pages of Connelly’s books, and turned him into a living, breathing human being, just like Alan Ritchson did with Jack Reacher.
Bosch ended its run in 2021, after seven seasons, but the franchise has lived on in two spinoffs, with a third on the way. In 2022, we got a sequel show called Bosch: Legacy, which was basically Bosch season 8 in all but name, and that ran for another two seasons. Detective Renée Ballard has gotten her own series, and a prequel show based on Bosch’s early career — Bosch: Start of Watch, starring Cameron Monaghan as young Bosch — is currently in the works.
Bosch fits into a neat category of “dad TV” on Prime Video, alongside Reacher and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Middle-aged men love all the simple pleasures these shows have to offer: explosions, fight scenes, wry quips, and murder mysteries.
Bosch
- Release Date
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2015 – 2021-00-00
- Network
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Prime Video
- Showrunner
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Eric Ellis Overmyer
- Directors
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Alex Zakrzewski, Ernest R. Dickerson, Patrick Cady, Aaron Lipstadt, Adam Davidson, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Kevin Dowling, Neema Barnette, Tim Hunter, Zetna Fuentes, Christine Moore, Jim McKay, Laura Belsey, Matt Earl Beesley, Phil Abraham, Roxann Dawson, Sarah Pia Anderson, Stephen Gyllenhaal, Tara Nicole Weyr, Thomas Carter, Hagar Ben-Asher