Posted in: Amazon Studios, TV | Tagged: ballard, Bosch, Michael Connelly

Ballard: Author Michael Connelly Confirms Harry Bosch Plays Major Role

Author Michael Connelly revealed that Harry Bosch will play a significant role during the first season of "Bosch: Legacy" spinoff Ballard.

Bosch: Legacy may be over, but Harry Bosch's story isn't. The finale episode of the series introduced Detective Renée Ballard (Maggie Q) as a kind of backdoor pilot for her spinoff series Ballard, and when her show premieres, Titus Welliver will show up more than once as Harry Bosch after she's exiled to an underfunded Cold Cases unit. In an interview with TV Insider, author and series creator Michael Connelly talked about Bosch's role in the first season of the spinoff and his involvment in her unit's first major case.

Ballard Season 1 Partially Adapted From the Novel "Desert Star"

"It's from a book I wrote called Desert Star," said Connelly. "That was one through line, but that's not going to work on a TV show. You need other stuff. So, there are wins in every episode, a weird balancing act where you have to have hooks at the end of every episode. That's so the viewer wants to go on, but you also want to give them wins. So some minor cases get solved, but also, the detectives find wins themselves that keep the momentum of the main case going."

Connelly confirmed that Bosch would not only appear in the season but also play a major role in the story.

"It's not like cameos, he's not walking through scenes. He's a contributor who is in either three or four episodes, and he has an influence on the story. Basically, the unit starts looking into a case that Bosch worked for many years before, so he's involved and that's kind of where that comes from."

Ballard's Cold Case was Originally Bosch's

"The main case is a politically fraught one," said Connelly. "The show follows real life in a big way. The LAPD, because of personnel demands, decided at one point to put more people out on the street, and then they closed down Cold Case. There was a political uproar, so they reconstituted the Cold Case Unit with one detective who then had to curate a bunch of volunteers. That's what happened in real life, and that's what happens in the Ballard show. So that's how it starts off — the very first case is a city councilman who's responsible for restarting the unit. Twenty-five years earlier, his sister was the victim of a murder, and so he wants that to be the first case that they work on and that happens to have been the case that Bosch worked on. I'm not going to reveal who did it, but it does lead us to a series of villains that they're after across the whole season."

Ballard premieres Wednesday, July 9th, on Prime Video.

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