Stream It Or Skip It?

Bosch: Legacy just ended, but Ballard is back on the job. In this direct Prime Video spinoff from the police procedurals that featured Titus Welliver as a hard-driving robbery-homicide detective, Maggie Q is Renée Ballard, once RHD herself, now the leader of the LAPD’s underfunded, under-cared-about cold case department. Ballard, from showrunners Michael Alaimo and Kendall Sherwood and co-executive producer Michael Connelly – whose books are the basis for Bosch and Ballard characters, plus The Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix – and co-starring Courtney Taylor and John Carroll Lynch, will also entertain some crossover potential, as its lead detective has already collaborated with Harry Bosch. But in the meantime, Ballard’s dealing with her own baggage while running cold cases down.  

BALLARD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: A busy Los Angeles street at night, where a man is being pursued. Maybe he thought he’d gotten away with whatever he did. But his reckoning has arrived in the form of Detective Renée Ballard (Q). 

The Gist: Ballard’s latest arrest wipes another cold case off the whiteboard in her office, a converted file room in the basement of the LAPD recruitment center. But it creates no goodwill with a police department where the bureaucracy and toxic, insular boys’ club behavior that led to her current posting still thrives. Labeled an outsider, Ballard navigates the bullshit while shining a light on forgotten victims of violence. And to do that, she’s building her own team of outsiders. 

Let’s meet ‘em. Thomas Laffont (Lynch) was Ballard’s first partner in Robbery-Homicide. He’s retired, but was tapped for her new team personally. Colleen Hatteras (Rebecca Field) is an empty nester/online sleuth with an energy derived from new age crystals and true crime subreddits. Martina Castro (Victoria Moroles) is an intern, pre-law, with a Gen Z perspective. And Ted Rawls (Michael Mosley) is in private security, but joined the cold case team as a reserve LAPD officer – and watchdog in a sense, because Rawls is pals with Councilman Jake Pearlman (Noah Bean), the politician who funded Ballard’s department with the intention she’d solve the case of his sister, who was murdered in 2001. Pearlman surfaces periodically to demand action while offering no further help or funding. Ballard takes it in stride, but it’s frustrating. 

As the team looks into the murder of the councilman’s sister, it’s also investigating a six-year-old cold case involving a John Doe, his slaying, and the mysterious fact that he was holding an infant when he was last seen alive. Consulting that case’s “murder book” – a term familiar from the days of Bosch and Bosch: Legacy – also leads Ballard to Zamira Parker (Taylor), its original investigating officer, who left the LAPD after only six months as an RHD detective. 

At the waterfront Malibu house she shares with her grandma “Tutu” (Amy Hill) and faithful boxer/lab mix Lola, Renée Ballard spends early mornings on her surfboard, while the water’s calm. It helps her think – about her own past, about her own traumas, and about how all that stuff plays into her cold case work and its library of lost souls.   

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Ballard continues the TV universe established by Bosch and Bosch: Legacy, so even if characters from the latter won’t always appear in the former, it’s understood they’re all living and working alongside one another. The same cannot be said for The Lincoln Lawyer. While the legal drama is also based on Michael Connelly’s books, and also loves its Los Angeles locations, Mickey Haller can’t cross paths with Renée Ballard, either on the job or on their surfboards, because Prime Video and Netflix are on opposite sides of the streaming wars.     

But there are other cold case universes. Like Ballard and her team, the recent Netflix hit Dept. Q features Inspector Morck – Matthew Goode’s fantastically unapologetic curmudgeon – working out of a dank police station basement. Via Max, Prime Video streams all seven seasons of Cold Case, CBS’s early-aughts procedural that also fed into the network’s suite of CSI shows. And for another international take on cold case justice, especially when it involves violence against women, check out Graveyard on Netflix. A cool fanfic-style crossover would feature Maggie Q’s Detective Renée Ballard collaborating with Birce Akalay as Graveyard’s Chief Inspector Ӧnem Ӧzükü.  

Our Take: Even if you didn’t catch Renée Ballard working with Harry Bosch in the Legacy finale, Ballard’s arrival feels fully formed. Maggie Q brings her serious-minded, action-oriented capacity to the lead role, but it’s not like she’s always gonna be out here busting heads. Ballard is interested in its characters as individuals, not just placeholders in yet another police procedural team setup. Early on, it has already strongly hinted that what led Detective Ballard to cold cases – “What better way to keep the troublesome woman quiet than to silo her in the ass end of the LAPD?” – is in no way fully resolved, either within the department or in Ballard’s inner life. For as much as this series is about a team solving crimes, it’s also building out the personalities within that team, and banking on their outsider status as they also examine themselves. And they can’t be cookie-cutter cop show cliches, because half of them aren’t even cops.   

Is Ballard gonna liaise with Bosch? Yeah, probably – Prime has made no secret of Titus Welliver’s potential to return, and Ballard’s visual aesthetic is a match to what came before. But while Legacy got loads of mileage out of Harry Bosch staring grimly at the lights of the city, Ballard illuminates the “LA” in its title card with sunlight and palm trees, and the series finds its tone not in being jaded, but in finding fresh angles. On cold cases, certainly. But also on all the other shit that goes unrecovered. Together with her team members, Detective Renée Ballard is out to contest the status quo. 

Sex and Skin: Shows on Prime Video usually adhere to a “Like network TV, but with swearing” edict, and Ballard is no different.

Parting Shot: The character is retired, and the shows he was on are retired, but somebody’s always gotta say it, and here it falls to Renée Ballard: “Harry fucking Bosch.”

Sleeper Star: Amy Hill is a veteran of many, many TV character roles – remember when Frank Costanza wouldn’t take his shoes off for her family in Season 6 of Seinfeld? – and as Tutu, Renée’s grandmother and housemate on Ballard, Hill’s a funny, insightful counterweight to Ballard’s more serious nature. 

Most Pilot-y Line: “The past is present” is a notion Ballard often returns to in her line of work. “If no one cares enough to dig, then it just stays buried.”

Our Call: Stream It! Ballard is building itself around a singular character as it settles comfortably into the Bosch universe. But it’s also investigating new angles on the familiar form of the police procedural.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.