What I'm watching this week: a cop drama that's just inventive enough and a satire that actually finds a new way to make us laugh about the absurdity of Hollywood filmmaking. I've also found yet another reason to severely dislike the so-called "reality TV" genre.
Let's dive in.
Bosch: Legacy
Debuts Thursday on Prime Video
Concerns about copaganda aside, I've always loved a really good, police-centered TV drama – from the early days of Law & Order and NYPD Blue, to more challenging stuff like The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. But more recently, network TV has taken advantage of that love, offering viewers a procession of predictably formulaic spin-offs that feel more like thinly-veiled excuses to keep popular performers like Mariska Hargitay on screen than anything else.
So imagine my delight when Prime Video gave critics an early peek at the third and final season of Bosch: Legacy. Based on characters from hit crime novels by Michael Connelly – who also serves as an executive producer here – Prime Video's Bosch series takes your typical cop drama storylines and amps them up. The plots are a little more complex, the production a little better crafted, the scripts a little edgier and the casts a bit more high-powered.
The result isn't just a streaming show where characters can use the f-word – although they do and that's all kinds of fun to hear. It's a series that pushes all the buttons that broadcast police dramas engage, but with more craft and entertainment value.
At the center of it all is Titus Welliver's Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, a principled ex-soldier-turned-Los Angeles police detective-turned-private investigator who breathes life into the franchise's twisty, modern crime noir stories. Welliver, an ace character actor (Deadwood, Lost) who always seemed in search of a signature TV role, finally found one by inhabiting Bosch's damaged, world-weary attitude.
This final season features, among several stories, Bosch's effort to protect his unlikely ally, Mimi Rogers' defense attorney-turned-district attorney candidate Honey "Money" Chandler and accusations he may have set up a prison inmate's death. Like all great noir heroes, Bosch is a guy who knows how bad the world can get, yet still manages to be surprised — and deeply wounded — by its worst.
The franchise itself has been through enough permutations to fuel its own docuseries, starting as a purely Prime Video program called Bosch before it was spun off into the free-with-ads video service Amazon Freevee as Bosch: Legacy. When Prime Video added commercial messages, Freevee essentially became redundant. Plans to create one spin off starring Bosch's partner Jerry Edgar were scrapped – actor Jamie Hector's absence is still felt in this last season of Legacy – and another spinoff featuring Maggie Q as cold case detective Renee Ballard is planned for this fall.
For this week, just enjoy the final run of an 11-year stretch of episodes that helped Prime Video learn how to give fans a great police-centered drama, with a little something extra for those who can appreciate it.
Note: Amazon is among NPR's financial supporters and pays to distribute NPR content.
The Studio
Debuts Wednesday on Apple TV+
There are few things Hollywood loves more than pretending it can take a joke about itself.
Which is why most showbusiness and film industry spoofs leave me cold: Too many assumptions the audience shares satirists' fixation on Hollywood status and wealth, or too many cliched jibes on egotism, youth obsession, overwork and creative cluelessness (yes, HBO's The Franchise, I'm definitely talking about you).
That's also why I was ready to write off Seth Rogen's new film industry satire for Apple TV+, The Studio – despite mad respect for some really cool projects the director, writer, producer and star has done, from The 40-Year-Old Virgin and This Is the End to Prime Video's The Boys and Invincible.
And that would have been a colossal mistake – nearly as bad as the circumstances which lead Rogen's character, obsequious movie geek and spineless film executive Matt Remick, to be named head of a major film studio.
Yes, some of its storylines feel pretty predictable. There's an episode, for example, in which Rogen's newly-in-charge studio president visits (and disrupts) a set trying to film an epic "oner" — the industry term for a complex scene filmed all at once with one camera. There's another on Remick's inability to tell a famous director that a sequence he loves is terrible and killing the momentum of his otherwise fabulous movie.
But Rogen – who has created and executive produced the series with longtime partner Evan Goldberg and many others – has managed to make these stories more biting, insightful and entertaining than typical fare. (He's also onboard as a co-director with Goldberg, co-writing several episodes). It helps that they have real-life celebrities like Ron Howard, Olivia Wilde and Anthony Mackie playing amped-up versions of themselves, while drafting ace players like Catherine O'Hara, Kathryn Hahn and Bryan Cranston for other key, fictional roles.
Despite his image as a laid back, pot-smoking everyguy, Rogen is a Hollywood player with loads of directing, writing and producing projects to his credit, in addition to standout acting work. So it makes a certain kind of sense this guy would be the one to lead a spot-on laceration of today's floundering film industry.
And one to avoid: Paul American
Debuts Thursday on Max
"I think the show is going to f****** tank," Logan Paul says in the first episode of the unscripted show he and his brother Jake are starring in for Max, Paul American. The two brothers and YouTube stars have a long history of doing incredibly knuckleheaded stuff for attention – with stunts that range from Logan disturbing corpses in Japan for a viral video to Jake initiating an overhyped boxing match with 58-year-old former champion Mike Tyson. (One of his critics called Logan the face of "douchebag entitlement" — a line better than anything I could ever dream up.)
If you want to feed their legend further, Max has a show about the brothers dropping Wednesday, offering a predictably curated look at a bizarre family whose success seems to sum up all the things that are broken in modern media, celebrity and pop culture. Given how repellent I find their image and this kind of reality TV, I'm hoping Logan's prediction comes true — this is a show viewers with working brain cells should avoid like a Paul brothers YouTube video or a ticket to their next prizefight.
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