[Like most of
us, my lockdown
has offered the opportunity to check some TV shows off of my list. One of
the best I’ve seen is Amazon Prime’s
original show Bosch, based on the
longstanding series of police procedural detective novels by Michael Connelly
(who is part of the show
as well). The best part of Bosch is
its characters, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy the five most important!]
On the lead
character who echoes but also enriches and challenges a couple familiar types.
I’m far from the
first person to say it, but it’s so true that it bears repeating: there have
been few better fits between actor and character in TV history than that of Titus Welliver
with Hieronymus
“Harry” Bosch. Welliver has played tons of great
characters over the years, working repeatedly with both David Milch
and Ben Affleck among
others, but one consistent through-line across those roles, as Welliver has been
the first to note in interviews, is that many have fallen within the broad
category of the hard-boiled
cop/detective. Given that Michael Connelly has described a college experience (at the
University of Florida) reading Raymond Chandler as a key origin point for
his career as a mystery writer, it’s fair to say that Harry Bosch (the first main
character Connelly created, beginning with his award-winning debut novel The Black Echo [1992]) could be described as a hard-boiled detective in his own
right. All of that felt instinctively true before I had watched a second of the
show, and barreling through the six current, phenomenal seasons (with one
more still to come) did nothing to dissuade me of the notion.
At the same
time, Welliver has also in interviews frequently used
another phrase to describe Harry: “such a quintessential anti-hero.” I’ve written
a good deal in this space about TV anti-heroes, perhaps the single most
defining character type of this 21st century Golden
Age of Television, from Tony Soprano to Walter
White to Jimmy McNulty to Frank
Underwood to Don
Draper to Jack Bauer to Al
Swearengen to Boyd Crowder to Vic Mackey to Dexter
Morgan to Olivia Pope (and I could go on and on). Many of those figures are
overtly criminal in their defining activities, and many others are at least
more than willing to break the law to achieve their goals, so perhaps the
closest parallel to Bosch would be McNulty, a police officer who is genuinely
trying to be “good police” (and certainly succeeds at times) but whose personal
flaws and demons frequently lead him to make mistakes that damage both himself
and his communities. Given that the extended first scene of the first episode
of Bosch features our protagonist pursuing
and killing a suspect, after which his superior officer, Lance Reddick’s
Captain Irving (on whom more later this week), says something along the lines
of, “Jesus, Bosch, again?!,” there’s no doubt that Harry is established
immediately through precisely that balance of good cop and flawed man.
But despite
those multi-layered familiar tropes, I would ultimately call Bosch something
quite different than either the classic hard-boiled detective or the
quintessential anti-hero. Jimmy McNulty’s flaws and mistakes can be traced to
many of the same vices (or pleasures, depending on how you frame it) that have
defined so many hard-boiled detectives—sex and booze, to put it bluntly. Harry
Bosch drinks quite a bit, and has it seems had more than his fair share of
difficulties with relationships (although on the show they are mostly in his
past). But what Welliver has so compellingly
called the “darkness” in Bosch comes from a very distinct and much more
intimate place, one linked to (without spoiling all the details, since we learn
much of this across the first season) his childhood and his mother, the
darkness of the world in which he grew up and which so fully shaped both what’s
strongest and what’s weakest, most admirable and most frustrating, in him. Those
things mostly go unspoken—this is a show that respects its audience as much as
any I’ve seen, and demands a great deal of us—but they comprise the beating
heart of both the character and the show, and make it something familiar yet
strikingly unique and engrossing as well.
Next
BoschStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on this show or others you’d call especially
lockdown-binge-worthy?
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