By Iain Blair
How popular is Amazon’s Emmy-nominated detective show Bosch? So popular that the streaming service ordered up Season 5 before Season 4 even debuted in April. This critically acclaimed hour-long series is Amazon’s longest-running Prime Original.
Based on the best-selling novels by Michael Connelly, the show stars Titus Welliver (Lost) as LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, alongside a large ensemble cast that includes James Hector (The Wire), Amy Aquino (Being Human), Madison Lintz (The Walking Dead) and Lance Reddick (The Wire).
Dan Pyne
Season 4 kicked off with the murder of a high-profile attorney on the eve of his civil rights trial against the LAPD. Bosch is assigned to lead a task force — that suspects fellow cops — to solve the crime before the city erupts in a riot. Bosch must pursue every lead, even if it turns the spotlight back on his own department. One murder intertwines with another, and Bosch must reconcile his not-so-simple past to find a justice that has long eluded him.
Bosch was developed for television by Eric Overmyer (Treme, The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Streets) and is executive produced by Dan Pyne, whose film credits include The Manchurian Candidate, Pacific Heights, Sum of All Fears and Fracture. He also co-created and co-produced The Street, a syndicated police procedural starring Stanley Tucci.
I recently spoke with Pyne about making the show, the Emmys, production and post.
Eric Overmyer, who took a break to work on another Amazon production, The Man in the High Castle, is coming back to act as co-showrunner with you on Season 5. How will you split duties?
Good question! We’re making it up as we go along. I’d never worked with him before, but I did have a longtime partner before. Basically, we talk a lot and come to an agreement about any issues. The great thing about this show is that every season is its own entity, with its own rhythm and voice.
Have you started on Season 5?
We have, and we have almost six episodes plotted out and we start shooting in early August.
Where do you shoot?
We’re based at Red Studios in Hollywood, which isn’t far from the local police station, and we recreated that interior on a set, and it’s so uncannily similar — apart from a few details — that it’s hard to tell them apart. We shoot a lot in Hollywood and then locations all over the city and further afield.
Bosch has a very cinematic feel and look.
Yes, and that’s in part due to our producer, Pieter Jan Brugge, who comes from film and who’s worked a lot with Michael Mann on movies like Heat and Miami Vice — this is his first TV show. I come from a film background too, so we take more of a film approach and discuss stuff like the sound and visuals and what they should be like and how a scene should play before we even start shooting
Do you like being a showrunner?
I do, and I was well-trained. I came up intending to write movies and then fell into TV and got lucky with the show Hard Copy. I became a specialist in 10-episode arcs (like Bosch). I got to work with several legendary showrunners, including Richard Levinson and William Link, who created such classic TV shows as Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, and William Sackheim who did Gidget and The Flying Nun. I haven’t done showrunning that much, but I always ran my own shows. And it’s the closest thing to being a film director because you have control and get to collaborate with everyone else, including post, which is so much fun.
Where do you post?
At Red Studios. We have a great team, including post producer Mark Douglas and post supervisor Tayah Geist, and we do color correction at Warner Bros. with colorist Scott Klein. He works closely with Pieter and the DPs, and sometimes we’ll make an entire season cooler or warmer. We’ll get inspiration from movies — maybe Japanese films or Blade Runner and so on — to help us with the color palette.
Do you like the post process?
Very much. It’s so true when people say, like with movies, there are three TV shows — the one you write, the one you shoot and the one you make in post. It’s in post where you start all over again each time, see what you’ve got, what works and doesn’t. I’ve always enjoyed collaborating with editors and all the sound people. I love what they bring to storytelling: the way they can help say things and elevate the material and help make stuff clear for the audience, and show or hide emotionality.
Let’s talk about editing. You have several editors, I assume because of the time factor. How does that work?
Yes, it’s the tight schedule, and in order to get it done we rotate three editors. One does four shows, and the other two do three, and we alternate. That way they have enough time to cut a show and pretty much finish it before moving to the next one. If you only have two editors, the workload’s overwhelming, so we use three — Steve Cohen, Jacque Toberen and Kevin Casey. There are three assistant editors — Rafael Nur, Judy Guerrero and Knar Kitabjian.
You have a big cast, and a lot of stuff going on in each episode. What are the big editing challenges?
We have two big ones. As it’s an investigative show it can be very detailed, so clarity is always a priority — making sure that all the story and plot points get pulled in the right way and land correctly. Mike’s books are very twisty, and they have a lot of tiny clues, so as detectives walk through scenes they’ll see things. There’s a lot of visual foreshadowing of things that come back later. The other one is making sure the episodes have pace. Police procedurals tend to fall into a pattern of walk-and-talk, and we try and avoid that.
Who does the VFX, and what’s involved?
Moving Target, and their Alan Munro is our VFX supervisor. We use a lot more VFX than you would imagine. One of the show’s hallmarks is making it all as real as possible, so when we recently did a show with scenes in tunnels we used a lot of masking and CGI as we were limited in the way we could light and shoot the actual tunnels. I find that visual effects really make TV a lot easier. We do some plates depending on the situation, but often it’s really small stuff and cleanup to make it all even more realistic.
This show has a great score by Jesse Voccia and great sound design. Can you talk about the importance of sound and music?
Sound is always difficult because it’s TV. It’s the nature of the beast. TV often shoots so fast that the production sound can be problematic, what with traffic noise and so on, and you have to fix all that. But I love playing with sound and working with the sound designers and ADR guys. We do all the mixing at Technicolor at Paramount, and we have a great crew. There’s not a lot of music in the show, but we try to make it all count and not use short little stingers like TV usually does, or score a chase. We’ll use sound design or natural sound instead.
How important are the Emmys to a show like this, which seems a little underrated?
It would be great to be nominated, although maybe the fans don’t care that much. We do fly under the radar a bit, I think, so more recognition would be very welcome.
Thanks to the ongoing source material, the show could easily run for many more years. Will you do more seasons of the show?
I’d love to. What’s so great is that every season is brand new and different, with its own beginning, middle and end. It plays like a book, so we can really work on the tone and feel.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
