Review by C.J. Bunce
For all of the good choices and surprises of last season’s Bosch: Legacy, the third season of the series spinning out of seven seasons of Amazon Studios’ Bosch has arrived as a collossal misfire, practically unrecognizable for what became one of television’s best-ever cop shows. Airing on Amazon’s Freevee streaming service, the sequel series stuffed three seasons of plot lines into ten hours, with the final goodbye a backdoor pilot for a spin-off series. “Unsatisfying” is all you can say to describe the treatment of some beloved characters. Clunky and boring, the series wasted some plotlines that could have taken hold if only handled with the care given to the previous nine seasons of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch stories featuring Titus Welliver in the title role.
It all begins with bringing back Jamie McShane’s long-time suicidal ex-cop Frank Sheehan. His story was long-resolved and was the first out of place bit of the season. Then we got more of rising police officer Maddie (Madison Lintz) continuing to doubt the intentions of dad Harry. How many times must Harry and Maddie literally save each other’s lives before Maddie will ever give her dad the benefit of the doubt? One saving grace is that the entire season wasn’t spent on this story thread. Yet the wind-up was so quickly handled you might blink and miss what happened. No, Harry didn’t plan the execution of Maddie’s kidnapper Kurt Dockweiler by using prison inmate Preston Borders (Chris Browning). But that left the role of girlfriend Rita (played by Juliet Landau) up in the air, when it seemed like she was participating in some more interesting subplot (although the entire plot was coming dangerously close to echoing the Detective Don Ellis crime plot and wrap-up of the second season). Viewers never get to know where Rita ends up.
But the real kick in the gut is when the show kills off long-time popular cop and sometimes Bosch rival Jimmy Robertson, played by Paul Calderon. It’s a quick and senseless death soon reconfigured into an elaborate conspiracy that could have been the main thread of the season if not for new plots coming from every direction. The death is followed by scenes from Harry and Jimmy’s past shoe-horned in seemingly at the last minute, re-casting a civil relationship that was once all-out dislike to one of old pals.
Meanwhile Harry gets a subplot where the aging character conjures up a friend from his military past to run to Mexico to track down a killer. We’d already seen a subplot with Harry undercover trying to bust a drug ring when he was on the force, and this seemed like retread, Old Man Bosch style. He did it all outside the scope of his P.I. job for new client Siobhan Murphy, played by Orla Brady. But even with a complete performance by Brady, nothing seemed authentic about this job, or Harry’s “can’t let go” drive (maybe it really all comes down to the first series’ theme song?). With Murphy’s family killed, Bosch stopped at nothing to get the killer, but he did it with a focus like he’d been pursuing the case for years. Then suddenly in the last episode a case from the distant past does surface and he must do it all again, only sharing the win, and the final episode and last hoorah–with newcomer Renée Ballard, played by Maggie Q.
For those not familiar with the books, Ballard is another spin-off character like book, movie and TV series “Lincoln lawyer” Mickey Haller. But viewers not familiar with the books have no reason to care. The character isn’t all that compelling here, and distracts from what the audience wanted and deserved: a good ol’ cop-style send-off of the story’s hero. Even Harry’s last words are barely uttered by Welliver. What’s next for Harry? Where does he go from here? Viewers are left with nothing.
Appearances by old friends Crate (Gregory Scott Cummins) and Barrel (Troy Evans) and a new character played by White Collar’s Tim DeKay couldn’t save this one.
Other characters, including co-stars Mimi Rogers as newly appointed D.A. Honey Chandler, Stephen A. Chang as Mo Bassi, and Denise G. Sanchez as Reina Vasquez, all get completely sidelined. Sanchez gets possibly the best dramatic story work when she must confront a nephew for his crimes, but what happened to Andrea Cortés’s villain Victoria Hernadez? Viewers have no way to know. Mo Bassi has a quick scene with an old former ally and enemy (Jessica Camacho’s burnt agent Jade Quinn), which served as an interesting throwback–maybe something to pursue in the new series? But Chandler was written paper-thin this season (what happened to her secret therapy files, anyway?), and we’re left with nothing to give us hope for the show’s title, Bosch: Legacy, which we can only assume always meant Maddie Bosch.
Ultimately only the fourth episode, “Whippoorwill,” has the action and tight writing we’ve come to expect, with Bosch and Jimmy finally coming together on a project.
Was the production simply trying to get a few seasons of ideas into one? That’s the only thing that explains this strange, choppy finish. Will Rogers, Chang, Sanchez, or Mintz return? Here is the first look at the new spin-off series Ballard, with one familiar face:
Dragnet, Adam-12, The Rockford Files, The Closer, Major Crimes… Bosch was only the latest in a long string of great L.A. cop/P.I. shows, an adaptation of Michael Connelly’s character LAPD detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. The Amazon Studios series ran seven seasons from 2014 to 2021, before getting a much cheaper, slimmed down version of the story with a smaller cast of characters and a slightly narrowed set of police procedural stories. But the first season of the sequel, Bosch: Legacy, proved a big budget wasn’t necessary. After the brilliant original show, viewers got two solid seasons but the show couldn’t stick the landing in the final season and delivered an irrelevant final episode. Fans of the characters deserved better. Now only the first nine years will go down as one of the best, most rewatchable cop shows ever.
All three seasons of Bosch: Legacy are now streaming on Amazon’s Freevee platform.
