There are a lot of cop shows on TV and streaming, but Prime Video’s Bosch offers a particularly perfect spin on this often overly familiar blueprint throughout its seven seasons. The number of cop shows on TV is always steadily growing. One 2019 estimate found that over 20% of US network TV programming could be classified as cop shows.
Astoundingly, that figure may well now be an underestimate considering how many new cop shows have cropped up in the years since. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that shows like Prime Video’s far-fetched Scarpetta go out of their way to come up with wacky, innovative new spins on the genre.
Prime Video’s Bosch Beats Many Cop Show Competitors
However, the same streaming service’s huge hit series Bosch is proof positive that sometimes, simply following the formula is the best way to guarantee success in this overcrowded genre. On the face of it, Bosch seems like a conventional, arguably even cliché cop show.
Based on the bestselling Michael Connelly novel series of the same name, Bosch sees Titus Welliver’s cynical LAPD detective Harry Bosch work on homicide cases in the Hollywood Hills. Troubled by past traumas, Bosch is an unpredictable protagonist who plays by his own rules to catch villains that would otherwise elude his department.
If this sounds familiar and formulaic, that’s probably because, to an extent, it is. There is a reason that Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole was inspired by Connelly’s character Harry Bosch, since the show’s protagonist is a familiar collection of character tropes from earlier iconic fictional detectives.
Bosch Wrote The Blueprint For Current Cop Shows
Bosch shares his loose cannon attitude with the Lethal Weapon franchise’s Martin Riggs, his close eye for detail with every fictional take on Sherlock Holmes, and his sardonic sense of humor calls to mind the heroes of everything from Magnum PI to The Mentalist. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
What makes Bosch so much better than the average cop show or detective procedural is, paradoxically, the fact that the series isn’t constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. Bosch sticks to a formula that has succeeded for decades and utilizes this setup perfectly, toying with familiar tropes and clichés while still offering viewers the best of the genre’s somewhat predictable beats.
Bosch’s Critical Success Launched An Ongoing Franchise
If Bosch’s many franchise spinoffs prove anything, it is that Prime Video’s detective show stumbled on a gold mine when the series captured this balance of subversion and crowd-pleasing. Throughout its seven seasons, Bosch blended the simpler thrills of a well-told detective story with a few choice surprises, garnering consistent critical acclaim.
Bosch: Legacy then continued this approach for a further three seasons, before Ballard applied the same approach to the story of Maggie Q’s eponymous detective, a colleague of Harry Bosch who works in the LAPD’s cold case division. The upcoming prequel, Bosch: Start of Watch, will likely continue with the franchise’s winning approach.
Instead of trying to redefine the cop show, this Prime Video franchise leans into what works and then alters things just enough to keep viewers invested and interested. In the process, Bosch proved that traditional procedurals can not only survive, but thrive, in the modern media landscape.
- 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