'Legacy': a Bosch without a plate and a little lost

I was one of those who believed that

really ended when he aired his last chapter in June 2021. I should have suspected that it wasn't because two plots were opened: when the hero hands in his Los Angeles Police Department badge and looks out a window to apply for a private detective license, and when his daughter Maddie applies for admission to the body that her father has just left.

But both promises also functioned as graceful closures.

Everything had been collected, there was no guessing a will to stretch the gum, although readers of Michael Connelly's novels know that they never end.

Therefore, the premiere of

(Prime Video) was a surprise encore, as if the group came out on stage when half the audience had already left.

And the new series (I refuse to write a sequel, I reserve that noun for diseases) is nothing more than an encore of the original.

Nor is it less.

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'Bosch', the police drama par excellence

Like the encores,

it is a reward for perseverance for the most gluttonous spectators.

They may change the title, the song of the credits and some characters, but it is another season that picks up the story where it left off, which forces several important things to change.

The main one is that it is no longer a police series, since Harry Bosch is a private detective.

The Hollywood police station, the main stage, is transformed into a secondary set that houses the plot of Maddie Bosch, a trainee police officer.

That procedural part disappears, the one that most attracted me to the series, and its characters are greatly missed: Chief Billets, the ambitious and disturbing boss Irving and the loyal and tormented Edgar.

Luckily, it follows the comedic couple of Johnson and Moore, the two old cops who, now retired, lend a hand to Bosch on his missions.

By losing police blue (or black and white, like Los Angeles patrol cars), the tone falls back to a classic black register.

In one of the main plotlines, a dying millionaire hires Bosch to find a girlfriend from seventy years ago, in case she has a lost son to name as heir.

The old man lives in a Spanish-style mansion that looks like something out of Raymond Chandler's

, and the characters ooze the disenchantment of classic 1940s movies.

Mimi Rogers, as Money Chandler, Gregory Scott Cummins (from behind) and Titus Welliver in 'Bosch: Legacy' (2022).

The detective's relationship with the prestigious lawyer goes much further in the series than in Michael Connelly's novels.

From there, the scripts insist on collecting all the clichés of the genre, adding a few drops of spy movies and a stream of action movies, with a ruthless assassin copied from Lara Croft.

Only the body of Titus Welliver, increasingly leathery and with distant echoes of the most sly Bruce Willis, manages to amalgamate what, without him, would be a pastiche without head or tail, with plots that do not connect with each other and do not get to express themselves. sharply, in part because the new characters don't have the appeal of the old ones.

Perhaps it works because of the inertia of past seasons, or because Bosch's universe —that city of Los Angeles, with hard, overhead light, full of sharp edges and rusty gates— is autonomous and so well drawn that it can withstand anything.

Or maybe it's due to the generosity of a loyal viewer who, by now,

a marital relationship

Custom should not be ruled out as a criterion for assessing a series.

It may not sound very rigorous, but it is an important issue.

The series present their audience with a long, almost matrimonial relationship, and there comes a point where the spouses, if they have not divorced, forgive everything.

That doesn't stop us from seeing the flaws, and we have to admit that it hasn't been good for Bosch to hang up his uniform.

His character was much rounder when he was in the pay of the city of Los Angeles and his dilemmas alluded to the search for justice and the limits of the law, and not so much to revenge, as it happens now.

Since he registered as self-employed, he has been a bit lost, and we suspect that he will have more problems with the quarterly VAT return than with the multiple crimes he commits to solve his cases.

In that sense, the metaphor of the house is one of the loose threads.

The series opens with an earthquake that almost drags Bosch's hanging house down a cliff and forces him to move to the couch in the office.

The cracks in the house, an allegory of the moral cracks that have appeared in the protagonist, is a happy and powerful symbol that, like so many other things, is lost in the pastiche of Russian mafias, police violence, revenge by lawyers and spy technology from Vanguard.

But none of this matters, because the mere irruption of Welliver, with his pithy laconicism, comforts the convicted viewer, who is always grateful for an encore from his group, even if the singer is out of tune and they don't play their favorite songs.

We were happier at the Hollywood police station, but after so many episodes, we're not going to abandon the character now that he needs us to pay his freelance fee.

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