Bosch, one of the two or three best cop shows on TV, returns Friday for its fifth season on Amazon Prime.
Naturally, this means the return of Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver, top), and naturally, he’s in a tight situation.
He’s trying to stop a bunch of psychopathic bad guys who are feeding the opioid epidemic and don’t mind killing people in their pursuit of windfall profits.
The details are somewhat grittier than that, and suffice it to say Harry will have to employ more than his admirable brainpower to take down this crew. It also takes more than one episode, because Bosch is not a procedural that lets the good guy resolve most problems in an hour.
As the new season opens, Bosch still finds himself adjusting to the single father role, following the murder of his ex-wife last season.
There’s a little bit of the Castle situation here since Bosch gets along quite nicely with his teenage daughter Maddie (Madison Lintz, above), who is now working as an intern at the police department while she continues her studies.
Maddie has always played a crucial role on the show and in Bosch’s life, and she only becomes more important as the series rolls on. In her new position, she can make professional contributions to Harry’s life, though we’re pretty sure she also needs to be careful. And Harry sometimes drives her nuts.
Maddie also has wondered why Harry has not been a little aggressive about tracking down the perps in her mother’s murder. To be fair, he has something of an excuse: He’s been busy for some time trying to surreptitiously find the person who killed his own mother.
Small wonder he spends his life feeling tormented, and of course, there’s no chance that will abate.
This season also finds him sparring with his department, hardly an unusual development, over his handling of a case 20 years earlier.
That case sent him up against another particularly slimy villain, and the question, again not surprising for Harry, is whether he went strictly by the book in nailing down the case.
Elsewhere, all the regulars return, including Jamie Hector (top) as Bosch’s sometimes perplexed partner Jerry Edgar; Amy Aquino as Lt. Grace Billets, his sympathetic boss; and Lance Reddick as Irvin Irving, the deputy chief who has had some dustups with the department himself.
While Bosch touches on social issues and has a contemporary feel, it’s also a classic cop drama, focused almost entirely on the cases and the characters.
Thanks largely to Welliver’s intensity, we don’t miss what’s not there. In a sea of police shows, Bosch rides a wave.