Amazon’s Hit Detective Franchise Can Last Forever Thanks To New Spinoff Plans

While Prime Video’s biggest detective show might have already ended a few years ago, the original show’s series finale has done nothing to stop the franchise from becoming one of the biggest in cop show history. Cop shows have been a TV staple since the dawn of the medium, when Dragnet became one of the first major network TV hits alongside westerns like Rawhide and Bonanza. Like every other TV institution, the genre has evolved and changed with the times over the decades, and there’s now a diverse array of cop shows with something for every viewer.

Darker psychological thrillers like Mindhunter and The Chestnut Man blend grim character studies with the traditional police procedural, while the ‘90s classic The X-Files and the many supernatural cop shows that followed the innovative hit take this approach even further. The X-Files, Fringe, Evil, Grimm, Lucifer, and many other hits in this subgenre blend elements of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi with a basic cop show premise, just like Brooklyn 99 fashions a workplace sitcom from the cop show setup.

Within this context, it would be reasonable to expect that traditional, straightforward detective dramas have fallen out of favor. With so many networks and streaming services subverting, deconstructing, and rearranging the elements of the cop show format, the thought of a show succeeding by simply sticking to the traditional police procedural script seems unlikely. However, that is exactly what Prime Video’s seven-season hit Bosch managed when the show debuted in February 2014.

Bosch: Start of Watch Lets The Franchise Work Backwards and Forwards Simultaneously

Running for 68 episodes between 2014 and 2021, Bosch was a massive hit with viewers of the streaming service. Based on the prolific bestselling author Michael Connelly’s novel series of the same name, Bosch saw Titus Welliver’s troubled eponymous LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch solve mysterious murders in the Hollywood Hills while also tackling corruption within his own department.

Like Prime Video’s later hit series Cross, Bosch brought elements of dark psychological thrillers to the cop show formula, with the titular antihero following some particularly twisted killers over the years. Like any good loose cannon, Bosch also had personal demons of his own to battle, and the show’s title character was nowhere near stable even by the end of the series.

This might have been tough for him, but it was great news for fans of the franchise since it meant the sequel series Bosch: Legacy could begin on Amazon Freevee less than a year after the original series finale of Bosch arrived. Bosch: Legacy lasted three seasons from 2022-2025, but even that was not the end of the sprawling Bosch franchise on Prime Video.

Before Bosch: Legacy ended, the franchise announced its first spinoff, Ballard. Starring Maggie Q as the titular detective who specializes in cold cases, Ballard debuted to stellar reviews in 2025 and soon earned a second-season renewal in October of the same year. As if this wasn’t enough, the same month saw Prime Video announce a prequel to the original show, Bosch: Start of Watch. Gotham and Shameless star Cameron Monagahan was soon cast as the prequel’s younger version of Bosch, and the show is set to chronicle his early years on the force before the original series began.

Bosch: Start of Watch Could Last For Years

This means that the Bosch franchise is now heading into uncharted terrain, even in the well-worn territory of sprawling cop show franchises. While long-running hit shows like Law & Order, CSI, and Criminal Minds have all spawned spinoffs, Bosch is now the only detective franchise to release both a prequel series and a sequel series simultaneously.

Admittedly, Ballard is a spinoff rather than a straightforward sequel in the vein of Bosch: Legacy, but the show still features many of the same characters, takes place in the same universe, and even involves Bosch himself. There are plenty of small-screen franchises, like the Pretty Little Liars series, that spawned multiple spinoff shows but were still never able to recapture the success of their first outing.

However, what the Bosch franchise is doing is profoundly different. The announcement of Bosch: Start of Watch means that the franchise is currently forging forward with Ballard, which is set after Bosch and Bosch: Legacy, and backwards with the prequel.

Since it will be a very, very long time before the prequel threatens to catch up to the start of the original show, Bosch: Start of Watch could last for over a decade without stepping on the toes of its predecessor. The series could fill in the entire career of Bosch up until the original series, which would result in a show that was just as long as Reacher, Cross, Scarpetta, or any of the other Prime Video procedural action thrillers based on bestselling book series of over 30 novels.

Bosch’s Spinoff/ Prequel Setup Makes Prime Video’s Detective Franchise Unstoppable

It is clearer than ever in 2026 that expanding fictional universes are no longer just the domain of massive IPs like Star Wars or the MCU. Stranger Things was only off the air three months before the series released its first animated spinoff, Netflix’s divisive Tales from ’85, and there are countless cases of even minor hits spawning spinoffs the second they become successful on streaming services.

As such, Prime Video’s decision to not just double but triple down on the success of the Bosch franchise makes sense. After the finale of The Boys, the streaming service is now down one flagship show and, while Vought Rising will extend the fictional universe of that superhero satire, the cancellation of Gen V means its future is limited.

In contrast, the Bosch franchise is now growing in both directions and always has the option of bringing back the original show itself, which would be an increasingly big deal the longer it is since Bosch: Legacy’s finale. Admittedly, the Dexter franchise briefly released both a sequel and a prequel simultaneously with 2025’s overlapping Dexter: Original Sin and Dexter: Resurrection.

However, the swift cancellation of the former proves that this was too much for the niche cult series. In contrast, Bosch is such a huge mainstream hit that the detective drama can afford to release two shows at opposite ends of its canon timeline at the same time.

Release Date

2015 – 2021-00-00

Network

Prime Video

Showrunner

Eric Ellis Overmyer

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