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Ballard: Did a Series Regular Die So Another Character Might Live?

Ballard Season 1 kills off a series regular, but was their death a sign that a character from the books will have a different fate?

The first season of Ballard is now up in its entirety on Prime Video and has been well-received. Maggie Q is doing possibly the best work of her career as Michael Connelly's latest unstoppable cop. However, the season might be using way too many familiar cop show tropes, including killing off a regular cast member to raise the stakes and make the audience feel sad. However, this might be good news to fans of the books and the new show: another regular cast member who was killed in the books might not get killed off in the TV series.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD: There are major spoilers here for both Ballard season one and the latest "Bosch & Ballard" novel, "The Waiting".

Alas, Poor Rawls

Ted Rawls (Michael Mosley) is a character created for the TV series and not featured in the books. He was one of the reserve investigators in Ballard's cold case unit in season one. Ostensibly installed to spy on Ballard's progress and report to Councilman Pearlman, who is looking for an excuse to replace her if she doesn't make any headway in solving his sister's murder. Rawls initially starts out as an annoyance to Ballard and the squad: slightly cavalier, pessimistic, and prone to whining, but he becomes as sincere and earnest as everyone else in closing cases and bringing closure to the victims' families. Mosley is an excellent character actor who's able to play a flawed character just by standing still, and is able to gradually introduce shades of nuance, like revealing that Rawls, for all his flaws, is at heart a nice guy. In the penultimate episode of the season, he's shot by the serial killer they've been hunting all season and dies in the finale. Rawls is a rare male character who gets fridged in order to make the case personal for the main character and raise the stakes for their hunt for the bad guy.

Colleen Hatteras, Ballard's Schrodinger's Cat

Colleen Hatteras is one of the few supporting characters from the Bosch & Ballard books who was translated whole into the TV series version. A civilian volunteer in the cold case unit, Hatteras is a middle-aged divorced mom and empty nester who was hooked on true crime podcasts and got the bug to volunteer. She's eager, gossipy, and has an issue with boundaries, where she gets a little too interested in everyone's business. She also says she's an empath, which is not quite psychic, but she can pick up vibes or feelings that she feels can help her find clues in their investigations. She has a tendency to annoy Bosch and Ballard, but the latter keeps her around because of her skills at scouring social media and the internet to find information and clues cops tend to miss. In the TV series, she's occasionally an audience surrogate as a civilian who's been let into the closed world of cops and real investigations. In the most recent book, she gets murdered by the serial killer they've been tracking when she inadvertently gets too close and exposes her role in the investigation. In the TV series, she's still very much alive.

Did Rawls' Death Save Colleen in the TV Series?

The TV series took a lot of the plots from over four Ballard books and remixed them to fit a TV format, as well as rush through its introduction to Ballard as a character. In cop stories, the murder of a regular supporting character is a common trope, sometimes a cynical one, to elicit audience shock and emotion. It's surreal that Rawls and the books' version of Colleen were murdered by different versions of the same serial killer, as in, his identity is different in the TV series and the books. However, the TV series' decision to kill off a member of the squad so soon might mean the Colleen in the show might not die in a future season after all, since it would be repetitive to kill off another member of Ballard's squad. In the TV version, she has become a crucial part of the show because her emotional reactions and point of view provide a different perspective from the more hardbitten attitudes of the cops. The Bosch TV universe is an alternative from the books, so some characters become more prominent in the TV version, such as Honey Chandler (Mimi Rogers), who was a greedy lawyer in the books who got murdered, but in the show became one of the good guys and an ally of Bosch's. The way TV shows change characters and storylines can get very strange, and book fans either love or hate the changes, but these are engaging exercises in the demands of TV storytelling.

Ballard is streaming on Prime.

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