Following the success of its screen version of Michael Connelly’s veteran detective Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver, Prime Video aims to make lightning strike twice by televising Connelly’s series of Renée Ballard books. Like Bosch, Ballard works for the LAPD, but has been demoted from the Robbery-Homicide division after reporting a sexual assault by her supervisor, Robert Olivas.
It’s a man’s world in the LAPD, people. She now heads a cold case unit, staffed by a motley group of part-timers and civilians, and one of the first cases it revisits is the unsolved murder of the sister of City Council member Jake Pearlman.
The investigation by Ballard’s team begins to turn up some sinister and unexpected angles to the case (this doesn’t seem to be a cold case so much as a barely investigated one), and before long Ballard is feeling fairly confident that somebody, or somebodies, inside the police department has been destroying evidence. Needless to say, things go from bad to worse, as they begin to unravel evidence of a hitherto-unknown serial killer on the loose, while it becomes clear that institutional rot runs deep inside the LAPD.
So deep, in fact, that it seems there are rogue cops who are on the payroll of murderous Mexican drug cartels, and among other things the bent officers are running a gun-running scam to provide the gangs with weapons. Murder, kidnapping and bribery are the routine tools of their trade.
This could all begin to resemble a list of bad-cop clichés, but Ballard is lifted out of the ordinary by its strong cast and the way Ballard’s somewhat motley crew pool their own idiosyncratic talents. John Carroll Lynch brings dry wit and avuncular warmth to the role of Thomas Laffont (pictured above), who was Ballard's patrol partner back in the day, while Michael Mosley lends a kind of gauche eagerness to Ted Rawls.
The show has a pronounced female empowerment theme running through it. The relationship between Ballard and Samira Parker (Courtney Taylor, pictured below with Ms Q) is particularly prominent, with Parker battling to make her way in the force as a black police officer, after also suffering demoralising abuse at the hands of the loathsome Olivas (Ricardo Chavira). As internet whizz Colleen Hatteras, Rebecca Field adds welcome cheerfulness as well as a retina-scorching colour sense, and rooky cop Martina Castro (Victoria Moroles) has to fight her way out of a distinctly tricky situation.
But hats off to Maggie Q as Ballard, who helms her team with an aura of natural authority, while also managing to keep her cool when confronted with internal police politics and the pig-headed attitudes of (male) superior officers. She gets a bit of emotional back-story too, centring around the loss of her father in a surfing accident which keeps coming back to haunt her. Meanwhile, Welliver pops up at strategic intervals as Harry Bosch, giving Ballard a useful steer or a shot of moral support to keep her on the straight and narrow. The show’s creators Michael Alaimo and Kendall Sherwood have done a commendable job of transplanting Connelly’s books to the screen, and further series would seem to be inevitable.
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