Thursday, December 13, 2018

Bosch and Chicago PD on Amazon


Beginning to scrabble about to find something to watch on Amazon I had a punt at some of the cop shows available.


The first of these was Bosch, Hieronymus or Harry Bosch. The use of this name and the style of the whole thing leads me to suspect these are based on books. The plotting was tight, I cared about the characters and, frankly, I enjoyed four seasons of this and will probably enjoy more as they appear. The main character plays his role well – I’ve seen him elsewhere too (Agents of Shield). The only problem I have with him is that he is supposed to be a tough ex Special Forces guy, but physically is not at all convincing.



Hoping to find something more in the same vein I next tried Chicago PD. This started out well with a tough cop who had a beat them till they confess technique for solving crimes. The characters and story lines all gelled and his ‘intelligence’ unit had to deal with some nasty crimes using morally grey methods. I enjoyed the subplots with the uniformed officers too and to a certain extent this reminded me of The Shield. However, after a couple of seasons it began to wander off course. Too much lengthy emoting seemed to become the thing – long stretches of cops suffering emotional problems and being hugely empathetic. And, increasingly, the modern disease of TV and film began to encroach. I’m up to Season Four and finding myself fast-forwarding. There doesn’t seem to be an episode now without politically correct proselytizing shoehorned in and, as is the case when this bullshit starts, the plots are falling apart and the characters ceasing to be believable. Shame really.  

3 comments:

Sue said...

The Harry Bosch books are by Michael Connelly and are good books - wasn't aware that they'd made a TV series - must get around to having a look (although I bet it won't be as good as the books)

Conor said...

Have you checked out Safe on Netflix yet? It’s excellent! But don’t make any plans for the weekend as they’ll be burned.

Unknown said...

I really enjoyed Bosch. I would recommend Peaky Blinders for mob drama and Norsemen for a surprising comedy, both on Netflix.