THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Even that name, Hieronymus Bosch, lends an antique tint. Like his Flemish painter namesake, he sees a complex and dangerous world that others don't. Harry Bosch tries to make his peace with the world everyone else sees: working at quitting smoking, listening to his daughter's recommended playlists, and dutifully learning to cope with computerized police-work, even though his heart manifestly isn't in any of it.

Welliver's portrayal of Bosch conveys an understanding that some degree of brokenness is the lot of those who live by an old code in a new world. Over the course of the series, we encounter the detritus of a life lived in single-minded obsession. The first season in particular explores the moral choices that meant the difference between an orphan like Bosch growing up to become a detective obsessed with obtaining justice for murdered victims rather than one of the predators he hunts.

Bosch is an old soul surrounded by a changed Los Angeles, and his every misstep is hounded by Internal Affairs apparatchiks, by reporters rushing half-examined stories online in the hunt for clicks, and by opportunistic lawyers looking to sue the city for alleged police misconduct. Bosch survives, and even thrives in his own way, by doing things the old-fashioned way -- paying attention to details like the scent of gunpowder on the hands of a corpse or noticing a photo that should be there but isn't.

The series gives an obligatory nod to gritty NCIS-style forensic procedurals and gruesome smut in the first season. But as Bosch's character unfolds through story arcs that stretch across multiple seasons, one increasingly sees a version of the Father Brown quality that G. K. Chesterton built into his own corpus of detective stories. Like Father Brown, Bosch's most important tools are moral. The probable identity of a killer is derived from the investigator's ability to discern the moral character of possible suspects, comparing those observations with the crime committed. Sometimes this intuition leads to nailing a slippery suspect, and at other times it means that Bosch refuses to accept too readily even seemingly damning evidence or a plausible confession when it doesn't line up with his moral intuition.

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