Bosch, Season 2

It's time again for one of the best opening themes in television again (I'll just wait while you rewatch the Season 1 credits):

That's right, everyone, Bosch is back.

If you don't remember and are too apathetic to read my review of Season 1, Bosch is a police procedural based on the mystery novels of Michael Connolly (fun fact: The Lincoln Lawyer -- the book and the Matthew McConaughey movie -- are a spin-off of the Bosch novels; apparently the Lincoln Lawyer is Bosch's half-brother).

As we left Season 1, Detective Heironymous "Harry" Bosch (played by Titus Welliver) had stopped a serial killer, solved the murder of a little boy, and gotten himself deeply in trouble with the police department for reasons completely unrelated to his gruff personality and "pragmatism" when it comes to police procedure. It's now six months later; Bosch is back to work solving crimes when a mobbed-up Armenian pornographer is found shot dead and stuffed into the trunk of his Bentley.

Suspicion immediately falls on the victim's wife, Victoria Allen (played by Jeri Ryan), as Starfleet is always suspicious of the Borg:

Seriously, though, it's because Tony Allen was a man who launders money for Armenian organized crime and spent a lot of time in Vegas in the company of strippers not his wife. She just maybe was jealous and looking for some of the money.

But clearly she didn't double-tap Tony on a lonely California highway and shove him in his trunk. So who did?

Bosch applies his trademark lack of tact and vengeful need to get the perp to this case, even when it makes him enemies with the mob and the FBI. In the meantime, we continue to follow some of the other characters from Season 1; Deputy Chief Irving is still trying to finagle a chiefship out of Los Angeles politics and his son is working undercover for Internal Affairs. Surprisingly, these plots intersect with Bosch's main case in a way that is neither too brief nor too contrived.

I really enjoy Bosch. It's gritty; Los Angeles in this show is a hot desert full of nasty corrupt people, and that's just the police officers. But each person has a personality, real motivations, and are played well by a cast of people who generally aren't "Hollywood pretty." Even the villains are people, which is refreshing, because that wasn't true even for this show last season.

Last season, Reynard Waits was kidnapping mothers and leaving their infant kids behind in strollers crying. Reynard was a monster; remember that we are introduced to him with a dead prostitute in the back of his literal murder van. There are no monsters this season, just people who have decided to do evil. And the distinction is clear. Bad people still do normal things, like hang out with old friends and then go back to their hideouts to have trouble opening a tin of disgusting-looking Vienna sausages (maybe it was the lighting, but they looked super-gross). The show is better for it.

This gunfight, from the literally explosive final episode, was also one of the most "real" I've seen -- everyone's shooting blind, hitting things by luck alone, and desperately ducking not to get shot.

One warning: this season does not end "tidily." Yes, the bad guys are caught, but it's more of just a thing that happens than a denouement, because life continues to go on. It's interesting, it's plausible, but it's not an NCIS "got the bad guys let's high-five and have some drinks" kind of ending.

Backstrom Got Canceled But I Can't Feel Sad About It

I could have gotten the news from, you know, the places where you get real news, but instead I found out Backstrom was cancelled from Rainn Wilson's Twitter feed:

💀😢Backstrom😵

— RainnWilson (@rainnwilson) May 8, 2015

It is because of this method of learning things about TV that I read the physical paper nearly every morning, and a second, even more snobby physical newspaper on most Sundays. Otherwise, I'd be full of information about Claymore and last week's Game of Thrones, but not much else.

Claymore: It's like someone took the least interesting parts of
Berzerk and Dragon Ball Z and made them into an anime
about young women with oversized swords and plate mail miniskirts.

Anyway, I can't get too exercised about Backstrom, even though I did make it through watching half of the first season (about 100x more minutes of viewing than Maggie did). Before I get to the why, let me give you the most charitable reason watching Backstrom would be worth your time:

Rainn Wilson does a masterful job playing detective Everett Backstrom, a man whose childhood was being the "weird kid" who was bullied at school and unloved at home, leading him to become a deeply broken man whose internal demons prevent him from being functional at anything other than police work. He also has the self-care habits of a homeless addict and a misanthropy bordering on psychopathy.

Backstrom seems to take pleasure in two things: first, putting people who commit crimes in jail. Second, using the authority he has from being very good at being a police officer to verbally abuse everyone whom he has professional or official authority over.  Below that surface, he is basically resigned to failure and early death. 

This is what Detective Backstrom looks like when he tries to clean up to impress people.

Why is this not worth your time? Well, Backstrom would have been a great show if Backstrom's dark character were the jumping off point for an HBO True Detective season, or a series of complicated mysteries combined with character studies like the Swedish version of Wallander (like Wallander, Backstrom is based on a series of Swedish detective novels). 

But no. Backstrom was trying to be a semi-comic "murder of the week" show like Castle. This just doesn't work.

Every episode, Backstrom says intensely crass, inappropriate, and bigoted things to his subordinates, witnesses, suspects, and sometimes bystanders, because that's how he gets control over the world as he sees it. These are often played as laugh lines, as in, "look at how hilarious that Backstrom said that," whereas I often thought, "no homicide closure rate justifies allowing a police officer to behave like this." 

Instead of finding it intolerable, his coworkers adopt for the most part an "oh, that Backstrom" attitude where it's OK for Backstrom to be a somewhat uncontrollable jackass. Which is also disturbing because the reason Backstrom is a jackass is because he's a very damaged man, and nobody is helping him.

And the setup of the show means, even moreso than House, that Backstrom can't get better. If he stops insulting people all the time based on his deep core of pain and gets a shave, he's basically a generic profiler from Criminal Minds or whatever. And did we really want to see multiple seasons of a man who takes his self-loathing out on everyone around him played for yuks?

"My pain is nothing more than the fodder for your amusement, apparently."

Apparently Fox didn't think so, either, or at least felt the Nielsen numbers didn't reflect it. And I think that's wise.

Bosch - newish from Amazon Prime

Hello, blog readers. I'm Ben, author of the instant classics guest posts on Daredevil and Peaky Blinders. Maggie Cats recruited me to come on full-time because I already had a clever Blogger handle: "the Pedant." As a name, it's both a promise and a threat.

I'm one of those "cord nevers" the cable company likes to pretend don't exist; I use my DSL to consume from streaming services, as well as taking advantage that someone else's parents pay good money for HBO GO. As a result, my posts will mostly be about the things that I dredge up from Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Today, I'm going to tell you about the fun new(ish, came out in February) Amazon Prime-only series Bosch. It's based on a series of books by writer Michael Connelly, which I haven't read, but I'm told are pretty good. In both books and show, LAPD detective Heironymous "Harry" Bosch solves crimes and gets justice, law and "the rules" be damned.

Harry Bosch is played by Titus Welliver, whom you may remember as "SHIELD Agent who Deathlok stomped into a coma in season one":

"Wait, Patton Oswalt gets a regular gig on this show, and I don't?"

Or perhaps as "Starfleet officer murdering intelligent beings for spaceship fuel" in Star Trek: Voyager:

"The Paramount folks found this expression too intense for Star Trek."

He's generally a character actor for shows (Sons of Anarchy, The Good Wife), which is sad, because Titus Welliver is actually a pretty decent actor, which I did not define by lowering the bar to "not having a brow-heavy glower in every scene."

While Harry Bosch does have his share of brow-heavy glowers (how could he not?), he's a troubled soul with a large arsenal of non-glower facial expressions. The season starts with Bosch shooting a suspected serial killer who turns out maybe to be unarmed, and he gets sued for it.

Bosch being in trouble for doing the right thing in sort of the wrong way is a recurring theme. His respect for police procedure and "the rules" is at his convenience, but he does get caught for it. Usually, though, he gets off with only a minor penalty because he did in fact stop a very bad guy, although it's not because the bad guy was bad, it's because punishing Bosch would be politically inconvenient for the LAPD. 

And then, for the first season's story arc, some other police find Evil Clone of Mark Ruffalo (Jason Gedrick, previously on Dexter) with a murdered male prostitute in the back of his panel van.

"I swear I have no idea how that rent boy got into my panel van to then stun gun and strangle himself to death."

Dark Ruffalo is named Raynard Waits, and after a day of pretending he knows nothing about anything, he then claims to have murdered a bunch of folks, including a a long-dead child whose remains Bosch has just found. But Bosch is pretty sure Dark Ruffalo didn't commit that murder. 

Finding out who did, and whether Dark Ruffalo will get his due, provides the tension for the season. And it is tense. Promising leads go nowhere, Bosch makes ill-considered decisions in his personal and professional life, and the higher-ups in the LAPD (mostly The Wire's Lance Reddick, playing a different high-ranking policeman) and District Attorney's office are scheming to take maximum political advantage of the fallout. 

Did I mention the opening theme? It's Caught a Ghost's "Can't Let Go," which is the best expression of jazzy jadedness towards life since Morphine's "The Night." It predisposes you to a story of grit, of perseverance against near-certain failure, of an ugly world that still needs saving. It's a great theme. 

So, if you have Amazon Prime, spend some time watching Bosch. Unless you hate gritty detective stories, you won't regret it.