'Bosch's Renée Ballard Spin-Off Made This Key Change to the Story

The Big Picture

Maggie Q is a perfect fit for Renée Ballard, matching her age, background, and Hawai’ian roots, according to author Michael Connelly.
The Renée Ballard series will focus on the west side of Los Angeles, with Ballard working the cold case division.
Production for the Renée Ballard series, a spin-off of Prime Video’s
Bosch
, is set to begin in July.

Bosch has been one of Prime Video’s biggest success stories since debuting on the streaming platform nearly a decade ago, with one spin-off series already airing, one featuring Jerry Edgar on the way and the recently announced series revolving around the character of Renée Ballard. Maggie Q was recently cast in the lead role for the currently untitled series, and Michael Connelly, the author of the novels featuring Ballard, Harry Bosch, and more has spoken publicly for the first time about the series, and hailed the casting of his leading actor in a chat with the Tampa Bay Times.

Maggie is a perfect fit to the Ballard in the books. She’s the right age, and like Ballard, Maggie Q grew up in Hawaii, and she’s of a diverse background. I don’t get into too much about Ballard’s background, as you know from all my books, but people have made comments to her in the books. Maggie comes from diverse roots, and it is a perfect fit.

What is the ‘Bosch’ Spin-Off About?

Connelly also went into detail about what fans could expect from the show. While Bosch and Bosch Legacy have focused on the east side of LA, and Hollywood homicide in particular, Ballard tends to stick to the west part of the city. Ballard was also a detective who worked during nights in the first novels, but Connelly has opted to make Ballard switch to the cold case division quicker than the novels did, partly as a result of making the series easier to film.

“Shifting Ballard to the cold case squad makes it a day shift show”, said Connelly. “The night shift is not very appealing to people in Hollywood. The days are long, and if you’re shooting 4 to 4, 4 p.m. to 4 a.m., that’s tough.” He went on to add:

“Ballard is basically a West L.A. show. The Ahmanson Center, where the police cold case archive is, is all the way out by the airport. We have two shows ostensibly about L.A., but the Bosch shows have focused for 10 years on the east side of the city. There’s a north-south road called La Brea, and we cross it occasionally, but Bosch is east of La Brea, Ballard is west of La Brea. She works with the LAPD, so you’re going to see some of the LAPD people showing up.”

The Renée Ballard series is set to begin production in July. You can stay tuned to Collider for more details, and see Bosch in its entirety on Prime Video.