Bosch

Aug 10, 2025

Why do I love Bosch so much?

In spite of the fact that, by definition it is, well, another police procedural, a crime drama. Plus 95% of it is talk - in offices, in cars, in lifts, whilst walking streets, in homes, whilst stalking, in stake-outs, even during that rare chase which might ensue.

Even the glamorous city it is set in, Los Angeles, is dour, bereft of even a hint of its sybaritic underpinnings. Even if a rich man's house is visited, it is blood-splattered or has denizens steeped in committing the unspeakable. Its backstreets might not be smoky and self-destructed like a New York, but has its version of punks, drug peddlers, traffickers and crime lords.

And to top it all, Bosch is humourless, unrelenting, dogged, with some of the poorest interpersonal skills that side of the Pacific. He's tough, rude and permanently bitter - and that's only with his colleagues. Now imagine his interactions with criminals. In sum - Bosch is the definition of a 'pr..k'.

The only thing of beauty in the entire series is Bosch's home, on top of a hill, jutting out like his own determined jaw, with the entire city in view from its ceiling-to-floor glass-fronted facade. During night, as Bosch looks out, with the lights in the house dimmed down, the entire city below and front like a sky of stars, his shadow merges into the city lights: a symbolism I have just not got tired of seeing again and again.

But how much I love him, care for him, and season after season, look out for him, in all the perilous situations he walks into, in his world-weary way.

And there lies the magic of this consummate series. The writing. The character exposition and expansion. And how its slow pace, its conversations, its silences, all create a piece of a world we as viewers have come to adopt as our own, flawed people who we have embraced as pieces of our own imperfect selves.

This series is immersion. It pulls you in with such ease that you become familiar with every piece of that office, that home, of that rickety car, and of Bosch walking with his badge on his belt and granite on his face, cold eyes boring through the screen into your soul.

Because that's where this series is headed. The soul.

Wrapped in its crime-laden stories is a character study of moral ambiguity. And even as crimes are being solved, what stands in sharp relief is Bosch's fraught relations with his ex-wife, his fractured love life, his unrelenting love for his daughter, and his loyalty to the cause. And how easily he makes enemies of people he actually cares for.

Because ensconced in its neo noir tiredness, its exposition and loneliness are a commentary of our moral landscapes - as we go through our seemingly ordinary days making choices, often standing for our ethics, often crouching behind our own courage, often standing in our own way.

Because at every juncture of being imperfect, of being flawed to the extent that our lives often lay fractured, is our belief that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice", as Martin Luther King expounded so eloquently.

Bosch might finally be just a 'series', entertainment in its own darkened way, but like all great art, it has both long legs and a long shadow. It will follow you, it will haunt you. It will not leave you.