Watching Bosch’s Watch

Donna and I, huge fans of Amazon’s streaming TV series Bosch, broke down and gutted our way through the two seasons of Bosch Legacy on Freevee, the crappy Amazon channel with ads. In spite of the commercials we enjoyed these supposedly-not-quite-as-good-as-the-original seasons of the continuing Harry Bosch story as much as we did the “prestige” ad-free ones. So much so, in fact, that upon finishing Bosch Legacy we called up the listing for the parent seven-season Bosch series, even though we’d already seen it. Or had we?

You know how, when you view the menu for a streaming TV series a listing of seasons and episodes appears at the bottom of the screen, with episodes you’re already watched marked off? According to Amazon Prime, we’d seen every episode of seasons three through seven, but had somehow completely missed seasons one and two. Hot damn, new & unseen Bosch! So that’s what we watched this month, and when we finished bingeing the first two seasons we started in on three and four, even though we’ve already seen them, and are about to start re-watching the fifth. It’s that good a show.

But did we actually miss the first two seasons, or had we just forgotten them? I’m pretty sure most of what I saw in these older seasons was new to me — but some scenes were familiar. Maybe, I thought, those scenes were included as flashbacks in later seasons? But no, not so far.

Some of the shows and movies I’ve watched, and some of the books I’ve read, are lost to alcohol, but that can’t be the case here. Bosch began airing in 2010. If in fact I started watching it then, I’d have been three years sober. Donna, a moderate drinker at best, is pretty sure we never saw those early Bosch seasons, but like me also remembers certain scenes. As a quick memory check, we called up the first episode of the streaming series Fargo (Hulu), which we hadn’t seen since it first aired in 2014, and every detail came back instantly. So this do-we-remember-or-do-we-not business with Bosch is disturbing.

But it gives me an excuse to include the inset photo you see above, the one with Bosch and his big gun — and even bigger wristwatch. It’s a Rolex Submariner, a watch few cops could ever afford, explained in the script by the background detail that Bosch once made a bunch of money as technical advisor for a movie (which also paid for the millionaire’s house he lives in). The Submariner, by the way, is also the watch Sean Connery wore in the early James Bond movies, and is the holy grail of watch collectors (most definitely including me).

Since I began collecting watches, I’ve started noticing them in movies and TV shows. You usually get, at best, sporadic glimpses of a watch on an actors’ wrist, often half-hidden by a cuff. In Bosch, the legendary detective’s watch is virtually a co-star. You see it often, prominently and in focus. It has to be deliberate. I understand it’s the actor Titus Welliver’s personal watch, and I don’t know if he’s the one who thought of rolling up his sleeves and showing it off two or three times every episode, or if the idea came from the show’s writers and producers, but either way there it is – Bosch is a watch lover’s show.