Bosch is Back

And So Is Audrey Fleurot

Bosch is back, and not a moment too soon.

We've been waiting for the seventh and final season of Bosch (Amazon Prime), for more than a year. With shooting disrupted by Covid, the series about the hard-boiled, jazz-loving L.A. detective created by former reporter turned novelist Michael Connelly has been Amazon Prime's franchise hit.

I had never read a Connelly book before seeing the show, so to me, actor Titus Welliver is Bosch, so much so that I saw Welliver-as-Bosch in the pages of the two dozen Connelly books I've read since. I think I am up to date with his entire output, including his Lincoln Lawyer series (Mickey Haller, Bosch's fictional brother-in-law),  Matthew McConneghy played Haller in the Lincoln Lawyer movie. Do I see the slacker superstar when I read the Haller books? Of course I do. The only Connelly novel not to my taste is Fair Warning, the third featuring journalist Jack McEvoy. On a key level, it's a death-of-newspapers story that I could identify with too readily.

But Welliver, with his jutting jaw conveying incorruptability, his tattooed Popeye-after-spinach forearms his toughness, his stare a dare, is Bosch for all reasons. What's great about Bosch, the series, is that all the characters keep coming back, all with their own personal dramas playing out in each season's arc.          

The two well-adjusted veterans, so comfortable with each other they are affectionately nicknamed Crate (Troy Evans) and Barrel (Gregory Scott Cummins), are back. They've become viewer favorites for their happy banter, deep fellowship, and hilariously apt names. Partner Jerry Edgar (Jamie Hector), increasingly troubled and unreliable, has to cut back on the booze, and makes you worry whether he'll find salvation before the last episode.

The superb Amy Aquino as lesbian Lietenant Grace Billings, is having a rough time in the early episodes. Billings' relatively open sexual preference, always tough to navigate among some of the testosterone ragers at LAPD, is pivotal this season. A pair of moron rookie cops start acting out their bias (obscene viral photoshopped video), and the usually cool-under-fire Billings wants these suckers brought down. Billings' bosses don't like it at all that she filed an internal affairs complaint about her harassment, and already tense relationships are stretched pretty thin.

I'm not going to say much, because "no spoilers," but after three episodes, Bosch is trying to bust the Latino gang bangers who threw a molotov cocktail into an apartment building on New Year's Eve, killing a number of people. Bosch's creed is that "everybody matters or nobody matters," but the death of a child in the fire, labeled provocatively by the media as "The Little Tamale Girl," becomes his obsession.

A few plot and character points: LAPD Chief Irvin Irving (Lance Reddick) is feeling the heat from the new Latina mayor to solve the crime, adding pressure to his constant paranoia about the possibility of being replaced. Irving is one character that seems worn out, his neediness and obsession with both politics and "politics" a tired routine. J. Edgar is drinking himself out of everyone's patience and good graces. Last season ended with Jerry stalking and killing his personal nemesis, a Haitian gangster responsible for scores of murders in their mutual family homeland. This season begins with Jerry getting a weak slap on the wrist in the investigation of that shooting. Instead of relief from being cleared of misconduct, that it was found to be a "good-kill," J. Edgar has PTSD and drinks and sleeps through the first few episodes. Bosch is furious.

Bosch has an unanticipated girlfriend who is also in the justice system (no spoilers), and the musical themes this season for Bosch when he's chilling at home have been early Coltrane, thicker and darker than his previous soundtrack of Art Pepper, George Cables, Stan Getz. (There's an"official" Bosch soundtrack on Spotify with 64 songs.)

But the real star this season is Bosch's daughter Maddie, played by Madison Lintz since 2015. We've literally watched the now-22-year-old actress grow up on the show. Not only are her acting chops off-the-charts, but she's grown so completely into her character that she's now a co-lead. There's good reason in the script for that: She is now the trusted and competent assistant to former Bosch adversary, defense attorney Honey "Money" Chandler (Mimi Rogers). And that's all I'm going to say, but I expect Lintz to break out into an absolute A list actress, in movies and TV and perhaps stage, for decades to come.

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In the months waiting for Bosch, I've been spending a lot of time on MHz, which specializes in European crime TV, for $7.99 a month. Here are some of the shows that caught my attention, some better than others.

The Fox

This German series set in Dusseldorf stars Lina Wendel as Anna Fuchs, a former agent for the once ubiqitous and feared East German spy agency, the Stasi. She lives with the trauma of having her child taken away from her, and serving time in prison for treason after reunification. (She and her ex-husband spied on each other.) She's still got a spy's skills, and this sad woman finds a new life when she teams up with Youssef (Karim Charif), a charming young hustler (German of Arab descent) who owns a coffee shop with his very pregnant native German wife. Their odd couple detective agency always appears at murder scenes just ahead of, and in the way, of police inspector Ralf Eisner (Robert Dölle). The shifting tone is really entertaining; some people call shows like this "dramedy": I think of The Fox as a "comdram," which speaks to both the clever writing and versatility of the actors.

Charlotte Link. This series is based on the crime novels of Charlotte Link, a German writer whose books are best-sellers in her homeland. But the stories in the Charlotte Link series feature Scotland Yard detective Kate Linville (Peri Baumeister). A German writer composing Scotland Yard yarns. So it is a German TV series, in German, with English subtitles. It's shot in England: you know, cars with the wheel on what would be the passenger side of the front seat, the pubs and stores and crime scene tape all in English. Everyone in Scotland Yard is speaking German, which is kind of disorienting.

Even cooler is the Irish series Corp + Anam. If you're a fan of the Dublin murder squad novels deftly detailed  by Tana French, or have been to Ireland, you'll recognize the sites and scenes immediately. And if you've been part of journalism as a competitive contact sport, you'll identify with the main character, relentless, aggressive, rules-bending TV reporter Cathal Mac Iarnáin, played by Diarmuid de Faoite. He'll do anything for a scoop, including betraying sources and ignoring his supervisors. His wife, who wants to go back to practicing law, is played by singer/songwriter/actress Maria Doyle Kennedy. And they have a naive teenage daughter who is dabbling in online meetups with men. Troubles to come. 

But even if you're comfortable with Irish accents, you still might need subtitles, because the series is in Irish Gaelic, and Cathal works for the Irish Gaelic TV channel.  It's fascinating stuff. One guesses that most of the action takes place in Galway, Cork, and Donegal, on Ireland's west coast, where most traditional Irish speakers are clustered.

I say "Irish Gaelic" to distinguish from the sometimes similar, often not, Scottish Gaelic. If that's your cup of tea, catch the five seasons of Bannan, a family drama about a woman who had been living in Glasgow returing to her roots on the Isle of Skye.

I have yet to see Living a Lie,  a political drama in Wales, in the Welsh language. My preference for Wales-based TV is Torchwood, the Doctor Who spinoff set in the capital, Cardiff.

The Art of Crime. Captain Antoine Verlay (Nicolas Gob), a tough homicide detective, feels like a fool when he's assigned to the arts crime squad that works out of the Louvre, especially since he doesn't have the first clue about art. But he teams up with art expert Florence Chassagne, whose anxieties include bathmophobia, which is not fear of baths but specifically the fear of clinmbing stairs, with some acrophobia (fear of heights) thrown in. For some reason, the stoic, angry Verlay becomes Florence's safety-valve: she doesn't have the fear when he is near. For further research, I recommend "The Poetics of Space," by Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962).

Part of Florence's neuroses (we see her in session with her therapist), is being the daughter of a great but somewhat disgraced art expert, Pierre Chassagne. The dad (Philippe Duclos, who played Judge Robin in Spiral, the G.O.A.T. of French crime shows) is obsessively competitive with his daughter, another plot wrench. Verlay slowly becomes more human, more able to process his feelings (he's going through a nasty divorce and losing custody of his kids); Florence becomes less crazy, though the healing can't go too far. The repressed Verlay and the filter-free Florence are the essence of the show. In addition to interesting personalities, you'll learn some art history.

The Berken Case: The actress Audrey Fleurot, who also starred in Spiral as ruthless, ambitious lawyer Josephine Karlsson, stars in this one shot TV movie. She trades the va-va-voom look of Josephine, a French Christina Hendricks, for a sailor's cap. The Berken Case (2017) a TV movie (Peur Sur La Base in French), is a kind of NCIS France in which she plays a Naval/Coast Guard police officer trying to get at the truth of the death of a sailor during a training exercise. (Fleurot also played herself in an episode of the French Call My Agent.)

Inspektr Max: That's Max Zoli (Juraj Kukura) , a savvy 70-year-old detective, teamed with Filip Luxa, (Robert Hajek), a 20-something partner. Guess who the sex symbol is? It's Max, a most implausible "chick magnet." I mean, women many decades younger just throw themselves at him, find him irresistible. As much as I really want to believe this premise--I really do, you know--ah, I don't think so. In Czech, with subtitles.

MhZ has for sale three seasons of The Eagle, an Icelandic thriller that I watched way back when Netflix was transitioning from mailing DVDs to streaming. With one episode left in season one, it disappeared, and I never came across it again. MHz has it for rent, eight episodes, $11.99, for each season. I think I'll wait until it appears elsewhere before I continue where I left off, however many years it's been. Being asked to pay extra for a pay subscription service is not a business model I want to support.