‘Bosch’ Braintrust ‘Happy to Go As Long as We’re Wanted,’ Says Michael Connelly (Q&A)

Bosch: Legacy, the successor to crime drama Bosch, premieres season two on Amazon Freevee on October 20. Titus Welliver plays retired homicide detective Harry Bosch, now a private investigator. Mimi Rogers plays attorney Honey “Money” Chandler and Madison Lintz portrays Bosch’s daughter Maddie, a rookie cop finding her way on the streets of Los Angeles.

Author Michael Connelly created Harry Bosch and has featured him in a few dozen novels, including The Black Echo and Angels Flight. Bosch had seven seasons on Prime Video. An executive producer on Bosch and Bosch: Legacy, he spoke with B+C about the new season, why he likes Legacy better than Bosch and how painter Hieronymus Bosch has influenced his books, and his series. An edited transcript follows.

B+C: How is Freevee working out as a partner network?

Michael Connelly: All good so far. I think the show is very strong. I think I like it better than the first show. I like what we're doing, which was all Freevee’s suggestion. The idea of making it a three-lead show as opposed to a one-lead show really allows us to expand our storytelling and explore deeper explorations of a couple other characters.

So it's all good. I’m very happy and proud of what we are making.

B+C: This season is based on your novel The Crossing?

MC: Yes, but there’s so much in this season that's not in any book. That’s where we are now. We follow the inspiration of what we want to do with these characters, and if we can draw from a book, that’s all good. But there’s no rules in that regard.

B+C: The Crossing has Mickey Haller [of The Lincoln Lawyer] in it, correct?

MC: Yeah. That’s one reason why we chose it, because it made it perfect for Money Chandler to take over that role. The important thing about the book is Bosch being able to cross the bridge to work for what he calls the dark side, the other side. All those decades being a detective and working towards justice has a tendency to erode his opinion of defense attorneys, even though they're a required part of our justice system. He needed a case that would draw him across the work of … in the book it's Haller, but in our show it’s Chandler.

I think this is the perfect case because it really taps into a lot of his ideas about fairness and so forth. Finding hints that maybe this guy is the wrong guy, he is falsely or wrongly accused, really gets to Bosch’s motivations because it means someone else is out there who did this and got away with it.

B+C: What does Titus Welliver bring to the Bosch character?

MC: Everything. He’s Harry Bosch. His grasping of what makes Bosch tick from day one, really … actually, from the audition going back, I think that was about 12 years ago, it's just been amazing.

I have ownership of the character because I created him. But I really don’t anymore. He’s Harry Bosch. He carries that torch now. And I couldn't be happier or prouder of that. All you have to do is look at the performance he gives in the first episode of this new season and you know how lucky we were to get him.

B+C: For the new season, do you have a favorite scene or a favorite moment?

MC: It might be that scene [in episode one], where Bosch comes out of the coroner’s office where he has been drawn because they have a body that might be his daughter, and how the emotions all get to him as he’s walking out. Something as simple as opening a car door becomes something that he can’t do. And he more or less collapses there.

The performance of Titus Welliver was beyond anything I’ve ever seen from him, and I’ve seen a lot of good stuff. I happened to be on the set that day and to see it, just, wow. All that emotion went through the whole crew. It was a good moment to be there.

B+C: Do you shoot the whole show in Los Angeles?

MC: Yeah, and the environs. The desert was about a two-hour trip out of town. But we want Bosch to be very much connected to his city. That’s the key to that character and the key to our success. We film episodes in eight days and the standard formula is what they call four and four — four days on stage and four out on locations. But we’re two and six — we’re always out in the city. That is by design, to celebrate the city and his connection to it.

B+C: You’re signed on for a third season. How many more do you see the show going?

MC: I think we’d be happy to go as long as we’re wanted. It’s already been an amazing ride, in that we’re effectively writing, what is it, the 10th season? I know it’s divided by two shows but it’s the same universe. And so we’ve already had a luckier ride than I could have ever imagined.

I remember doing a taped interview with Titus on the balcony of his house when we were filming the pilot and asking him, ‘Can you do this for five years?’ And he said, ‘I’ll do it as long as they let me.’ And now we’re five seasons past that. It has been an amazing ride.

I don’t think we’ll run out of material. We do a lot of material that doesn’t come from the books. The whole Maddie Bosch string in this season doesn't come from a book. A lot of the Chandler stuff doesn’t. Harry Bosch has an office in this show. He doesn't have an office in the book. So we’re creating. There’s a baseline inspiration of character in books, but we're beyond that now and creating new stuff.

And some of it even bounces back. I put Maddie Bosch into a uniform in my books, but that first happened on the show.

So I don’t think there’s any end to the storytelling. It is really a function of whether the show remains successful in Freevee’s eyes and in the watcher’s eyes. But we’re here and we’re ready to keep going.

B+C: When you’re working on the books now, are you always envisioning how this would play on TV or are you able to keep that separate?

MC: I think I can pretty much keep it separate. But this show’s been a part of my life for 10 years now, so it’s impossible to keep it completely separate. I’ve always been a visual writer anyway, so I kind of see the scenes — I’m not thinking in terms of prose. And so I think that lends itself to it. In a way that just takes care of itself.

But like I said, the show has an existence on its own and it doesn't need my books anymore. But if they want to take something from my books, that's always good.

B+C: How’d you first get into Hieronymus Bosch, the painter?

MC: It was weird, it was just happenstance. I took a humanities class at the University of Florida and the teacher was fascinated by Bosch. So we spent a long time, probably five weeks, analyzing his paintings. And this was way back, before there was an internet, and most people had no idea who Hieronymus Bosch was. You’d have to have read some kind of art book, or something like that — it wasn't as prevalent as a Picasso or something.

But his paintings are allegories on good and evil, right and wrong, the wages of sin, chaos — all the things that I attribute to a crime scene.

That’s why years later I’m putting together a detective novel and I know a name’s important, a name should say something about character. And so I remembered that humanities class and went with Hieronymus Bosch.