Bosch: Legacy Adds a New TV Chapter for Michael Connelly’s Iconic Detective
No one can stop Harry Bosch. The Los Angeles-based detective created by author Michael Connelly and featured in dozens of novels has taken on every foe imaginable with gruff determination, and he’s always prevailed, albeit with the occasional sacrifice. The version of Bosch played on TV by Titus Welliver has defeated another kind of foe, emerging from the end of his seven-season Amazon Prime Video TV series to anchor a new series on Amazon-owned Freevee. The new Bosch: Legacy is essentially the eighth season of Bosch, despite its change in title and shift to a different streaming service within the same corporate ecosystem. The creative team is largely the same, headed up by Eric Overmyer, who originally developed Bosch for TV and developed Legacy with Connelly and longtime Bosch writer Tom Bernardo. Although it’s been touted as a new start, its first episode opens with an extensive “previously on” segment recapping events from the previous series, and most of the central characters are holdovers from the old Bosch.
One of Legacy’s major plot threads is a continuation from the end of Bosch’s seventh season, as Bosch and his lawyer associate Honey Chandler (Mimi Rogers) continue to battle with corrupt hedge-fund manager Carl Rogers (Michael Rose), who put out a hit on Honey that nearly got her killed. The biggest change in circumstances is that Bosch himself is no longer a detective with the LAPD, having dramatically quit at the end of Bosch’s last season.
He’s now working as a private investigator, but the show still spends plenty of time in the police department, thanks to Bosch’s daughter Maddie (Madison Lintz) now working as a rookie officer. Honey and Maddie get substantial storylines that equal Bosch’s, making this series a bit more of an ensemble, even if Bosch himself remains the central figure. The fourth member of the regular cast is a new addition, Mo Bassi (Stephen Chang), who acts as Bosch’s tech advisor and right-hand man. Thus far, he’s more of an exposition-delivery device than a fully rounded character, though.
The main case that Bosch takes on in this season is adapted from Connelly’s 2016 novel The Wrong Side of Goodbye. Reclusive, ailing billionaire Whitney Vance (William Devane) hires Bosch to track down a child he fathered decades earlier, so that he can name an heir to his estate before he faces death. Meanwhile, Honey, now working at a smaller boutique law firm, takes on some individual episodic cases, while she works to bring down Carl Rogers.
Out on her own, Maddie struggles to adapt to her position at the bottom of the LAPD pecking order. Like her father, she’s inclined to follow her own instincts rather than play by the rules, and she makes for a worthy secondary protagonist. If producers ever wanted to fully embrace the “legacy” part of the title and make a show just about Maddie, Lintz proves that she could carry it.
For now, though, this is still Harry Bosch’s show, and Welliver remains perfect in the role of the cantankerous, jazz-loving detective. Making Bosch a private eye brings the show more in line with old-fashioned hard-boiled detective stories, but this is still a pretty straightforward crime drama, and the addition of commercial breaks for Freevee makes it even more closely resemble a vintage network-TV procedural.
That also makes it fairly easy to pick up, especially with the regular recap segments at the beginning of each episode. So any viewers assuming that this is an entirely new series will probably be able to get themselves up to speed pretty quickly. If they want to catch up, the entire original Bosch series is now available on Freevee as well. For longtime Bosch fans, Legacy will feel like picking up right where they left off, a continuation of everything they love about their favorite TV detective. Legacy has already been picked up for a second season, and Connelly has plenty of additional books to draw from, so Harry Bosch is clearly not going anywhere.
Read the Books
For maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal . . . because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war. Now Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit. Pitted against enemies inside his own department and forced to make the agonizing choice between justice and vengeance, Bosch goes on the hunt for a killer whose true face will shock him.
Harry Bosch is California’s newest private investigator. He doesn’t advertise, he doesn’t have an office, and he’s picky about who he works for, but it doesn’t matter. His chops from thirty years with the LAPD speak for themselves.
Soon one of Southern California’s biggest moguls comes calling. The reclusive billionaire is nearing the end of his life and is haunted by one regret. When he was young, he had a relationship with a Mexican girl, his great love. But soon after becoming pregnant, she disappeared. Did she have the baby? And if so, what happened to it?
Desperate to know whether he has an heir, the dying magnate hires Bosch, the only person he can trust. With such a vast fortune at stake, Harry realizes that his mission could be risky not only for himself but for the one he’s seeking. But as he begins to uncover the haunting story–and finds uncanny links to his own past–he knows he cannot rest until he finds the truth.
At the same time, unable to leave cop work behind completely, he volunteers as an investigator for a tiny cash-strapped police department and finds himself tracking a serial rapist who is one of the most baffling and dangerous foes he has ever faced.
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Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He’s the former film editor of Las Vegas Weekly and the former TV comedies guide for About.com. He has written about movies, TV, and pop culture for Syfy Wire, Polygon, CBR, Inverse, Crooked Marquee, and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.