Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch Takes His Final TV Bow in ‘Bosch: Legacy’ Season Three
Michael Connelly’s private detective Harry Bosch deals with a new case and threats from his past in the third and allegedly final season of Amazon Prime Video’s Bosch: Legacy.
It’s a bit hard to believe, but Harry Bosch’s time on TV may be coming to an end. The LAPD detective turned private eye created by Michael Connelly has been one of the most enduring success stories of the streaming era, starring in seven seasons of Amazon Prime Video’s Bosch and now three seasons of its follow-up series Bosch: Legacy. The new season of Bosch: Legacy (premiering March 27) is billed as the finale, although there’s nothing in the four episodes available for review to indicate that Bosch’s story is wrapping up just yet.
There are still plenty of Connelly’s Bosch books left to adapt, and the third season draws from Connelly’s novels The Black Ice and Desert Star, while weaving in multiple ongoing subplots from past seasons. This is not an ideal jumping-on point for new viewers, but the storytelling is clean and traditional enough that anyone familiar with crime thrillers can pick things up fairly quickly.
The first episode begins eight months after the second season’s finale, which hinted that Bosch (Titus Welliver) might have had something to do with the killing of Kurt Dockweiler, who was convicted of kidnapping Bosch’s LAPD officer daughter Maddie (Madison Lintz). Bosch swears that he wasn’t involved with Dockweiler’s suspicious death in prison, but that doesn’t stop a pair of LAPD detectives (including Bosch’s former colleague Jimmy Robertson, played by Paul Calderon) from investigating.
Meanwhile, Bosch’s longtime associate Honey Chandler (Mimi Rogers) is running for district attorney, and both Bosch and Maddie take on new cases. That’s a lot of material to cover in each episode, and the storytelling can get a bit unwieldy, although some subplots are already wrapped up within the first four episodes of the 10-episode season.
Jimmy isn’t the only familiar face from past Bosch seasons to resurface, as a couple of criminals Bosch previously put away come back to cause problems for him and his allies. Bosch’s semi-bumbling sidekicks Crate (Gregory Scott Cummins) and Barrel (Troy Evans) even make a brief but welcome return appearance.
Although Bosch is being investigated by the LAPD and working as a security consultant for Honey’s campaign, he still finds time for a new client. Orla Brady plays a concerned woman who’s traveled from Ireland to look into the disappearance of her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter, who vanished while supposedly on vacation. Like all of Bosch’s cases, it escalates over time, and by the fourth episode, Bosch is rushing directly from life-or-death danger in the Dockweiler investigation to life-or-death danger in his own investigation.
Maddie and her partner Reyna Vasquez (Denise G. Sanchez) are assigned a less complicated case, tracking a crew of robbers who follow victims home from fancy restaurants. Over time, Maddie has developed into a keen detective on her own, with a less combative style than her father, and the show provides a nice contrast between their two investigations.
There’s some tension between Maddie and Bosch over the Dockweiler accusations, along with some revelations from Bosch’s past, further differentiating between their two worldviews. Maddie also starts up a flirtation with a public defender that could blossom into an intriguingly complicated romance. Lintz effectively balances these various elements, and it wouldn’t be tough to envision a Bosch continuation that places Maddie in the lead role.
Instead, what’s actually on the way is a series featuring fellow Connelly character Renee Ballard, who’s become a staple of the Bosch novels but has yet to appear in the TV show. Maggie Q is set to debut as Renee later in the season, and there’s a good chance that Bosch and his supporting cast will pop up somewhere on Renee’s upcoming show.
Given that Welliver has already started talking about possibilities for standalone Bosch movies, the detective probably isn’t truly bidding audiences farewell at the end of this season. If there’s one thing that Harry Bosch has proved over his last decade on TV, it’s that he’s far more tenacious than people give him credit for.
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Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He has written about movies, TV, and pop culture for Vulture, IndieWire, Tom’s Guide, Inverse, Crooked Marquee, and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.