The story starts with Detective Renée Ballard, who works for the Los Angeles Police Department. She's in charge of a special team that looks at really old murder cases that were never solved – they call these "cold cases." Her team is made up of volunteers and people who aren't full-time detectives, so they don't have much money or resources to work with.
In the first episode, Ballard and her partner chase a bad guy at night and she has to shoot him. The next day, her partner warns her that some people at the police department want to get her fired because of this shooting. At work, she's looking at a case about a dead man whose identity they don't know (they call him John Doe), when a city councilman named Jake Pearlman comes to yell at her. He's angry because his sister was murdered and Ballard's team hasn't solved the case yet.
Ballard finds out that the police covered up something important about the John Doe case. She invites Detective Zamira Parker, who originally worked on this case, to join her volunteer team. Parker agrees and meets the rest of the team: Ted Rawls (a reserve officer), Martina Castro (a law student), Colleen Hatteras (a stay-at-home mom who volunteers), and Thomas Laffont (a retired detective). They get some evidence from the councilman's sister's case to test for DNA.
Ballard lives with her grandmother Tutu in a house by the beach. She has some personal problems and sees a therapist because of bad things that happened to her in the past. When Parker goes back to investigate the motel where the John Doe was last seen, she doesn't find anything new. But then they discover DNA on the evidence from the councilman's sister's case.
Things get more complicated when Detective Olivas from another department shows up. He has a bad history with Ballard – we learn later that he sexually assaulted her at a party, and her former partner didn't believe her when she reported it. Ballard tells Parker that she was moved to the cold case unit as punishment for speaking out against Olivas.
The next day, Parker finds that a cleaning woman at the motel has been murdered. Meanwhile, Ballard learns that whoever killed the councilman's sister also killed another woman named Laura Wilson back in 2008. When she checks the old files on Laura's case, she sees that the famous detective Harry Bosch had worked on it.
As the episodes continue, they investigate the cleaning woman's murder and find out the suspect is a homeless man who seems mentally ill. They arrest him, and he confesses to being paid to kill the cleaning woman, but his story doesn't make complete sense. Then they catch the real killer of other cases, and the homeless man is innocent.
The team gets assigned more cold cases, including one about a college student who died at a fraternity. They discover that the fraternity had a secret book where they rated girls they slept with, and the victim had written about a girl right before he died. It turns out his girlfriend killed him because she was angry about being disrespected in this book.
Throughout the season, we learn that there's a group of corrupt police officers working with drug cartels. A former cop named Anthony Driscoll is involved, and he's been covering up murders and working with criminals. One of these corrupt cops is even dating Martina, the law student on Ballard's team, and he's been spying on them.
The big mystery Involves a man named Luis Ibarra, who was helping people cross the border illegally but was also working as an informant for the government. Driscoll and his corrupt cop friends killed Ibarra and covered it up. They also killed other people to hide their crimes.
Things get really dangerous when Driscoll realizes that Ballard's team is getting close to discovering the truth. He threatens Martina through her boyfriend, who is one of the corrupt cops. The team finds evidence in a storage unit that proves one person killed multiple victims, including Laura Wilson.
In the later episodes, everything comes together. They discover that Detective Olivas, the man who assaulted Ballard, is involved in the corruption. There are more corrupt cops than they realized, and they've been working with criminals for years. Some of the team members are in real danger.
The season builds up to a big confrontation where the corrupt cops try to stop Ballard's team from exposing them. There are several dramatic moments where team members are threatened or attacked. Ted Rawls, one of the reserve officers, gets killed, which is really sad because he had become a good friend to everyone.
In the final episodes, they manage to expose the corruption and catch the bad cops. Olivas gets what's coming to him for all the terrible things he did. The team solves multiple cold cases and proves that these corrupt officers had been committing crimes for years.
The show ends with the cold case unit having successfully solved their cases and exposed the corruption, but they've also lost a team member and been through a lot of trauma. Ballard has grown as a person and learned to trust her team, while also dealing with her past trauma.
Now for my review of the show. I have to say, this was a really mixed experience for me. On the good side, Maggie Q does a great job playing Ballard. She makes the character feel real and shows both her toughness as a detective and her vulnerability from past trauma. The idea of a cold case unit with volunteers is interesting and different from other police shows.
The show looks nice, with good shots of Los Angeles and decent production values. When characters from the original Bosch show appear, like Harry Bosch himself, it's exciting and makes the world feel connected. The cold cases themselves are realistic and feel like they could be real crimes you'd hear about on the news.
However, there are some big problems with the show. The biggest issue is that it feels very predictable and generic. You can guess what's going to happen pretty easily – of course there's police corruption, of course the bad guys will be caught, of course some team members will be in danger. It follows the same pattern as lots of other cop shows.
The dialogue sometimes feels forced, like the actors are reading from a script instead of having natural conversations. Some characters feel like they're just there to check boxes – the enthusiastic volunteer mom, the young intern, the wise older detective. They don't feel like real people with their own personalities.
The show also has some unrealistic moments that take you out of the story. For example, they expect us to believe that a serial killer whose face has been shown on TV constantly could sneak into a police training academy without anyone recognizing him. That's just silly.
Another problem is the pacing. Sometimes the show moves too slowly, and other times it rushes through important plot points. The romance between Ballard and her surfer boyfriend feels unnecessary and doesn't add anything to the story. The flashbacks to Ballard's father also feel like filler that doesn't help the plot move forward.
The show tries to deal with serious topics like sexual assault and police corruption, which is important, but sometimes it feels heavy-handed rather than thoughtful. The way they portray these issues sometimes feels like they're trying to teach lessons rather than tell a good story.
What's frustrating is that you can see the potential for a really good show here. The cast is talented, the setting is interesting, and some individual episodes work well. But overall, it feels like a missed opportunity. It's not as good as the original Bosch series, and it doesn't bring enough new ideas to stand on its own.
If you've never seen the Bosch shows, you might enjoy this more because you won't be comparing it to something better. If you just want a simple police procedural to watch without thinking too hard, it's fine for that. But if you're looking for something special or groundbreaking, you'll probably be disappointed.
The show isn't terrible, but it's not great either. It's the kind of thing you might watch when you don't have anything else to do, but you probably won't remember much about it afterward. For a show that had the potential to be really good, that's pretty disappointing.
Maggie Q acknowledged that there’s no guarantee of Season 2 despite mixed reception. “This industry is not what it was before. It’s barely recognizable to me, and shows are so expendable. They can throw out a show in two seconds” she explained. She also recalled past experiences where a writers room was assembled, but the show was still canceled.
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