Jack of Harts

I watched Ballard over the weekend. It is the latest series in the Bosch family of shows, and I can’t recommend the Bosch shows enough. They are awesome police procedurals with a gruff but competent detective in the lead role. The actors are spot on and do their characters proud, the stories are interesting, and overall they are just good TV. You can get them all on Prime Video as part of Amazon Prime, and they are worth it.

Ballard focuses on a detective introduced in the last year of the Bosch Legacy series, and also gives most of the Bosch actors at least one cameo to show the stuff. Ballard is a good character played by an amazing actor. And that’s as much praise as I can give the Ballard series.

It is woke.

I do not use that term often, because I frankly think it is overused. But this is a case where it is warranted. The main story revolves around the fact that the police are rotten and hopelessly corrupt and pretty much every single fit white male is some form of scumbag, asshole, or otherwise ends up getting treated badly by the show. The team is straight from CW central casting. The team leader, a woman of color, who once again is a great actress who plays the part well. One overweight old white guy. One up and coming eager teenage girl. One old overweight psychic woman. One fit white asshole man who might have a heart of gold if he could find it. And for the final CW casting character reveal, we have the angry fat BLM female who is stuck on the fact that policemen are bad, the police department is evil, black people who join the department are traitors, and other similar shouting rants over and over and over again.

And the less said about the ending the better. I come from a time when TV shows would at least try to leave some form of happy ending, even if there was a tease of more bad stuff to come. This is not that. The whole show drives you through the ringer one episode after another, and then dumps on you some more at the end.

I did not sign up for that when I started watching, and I did not enjoy it. I cannot recommend Ballard to people who liked Bosch. It is not Bosch, and it deviates from Bosch in a bad way.