Before ‘Bosch,’ CBS Cut Titus Welliver’s Brutal TV-MA Cop Show After 22 Episodes

Published Oct 12, 2026, 7:56 AM EDT

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Seven seasons of Bosch and three of Bosch: Legacy made Titus Welliver synonymous with Harry Bosch, and his return in Ballard extended that connection beyond his own shows. But his history of playing troubled lawmen reaches much further back. Before the detective became his signature role, Welliver starred in a gritty network cop series that lasted just 22 episodes, leaving an early showcase for his talent largely overlooked.

Welliver is an actor who serves as an example of such, achieving notable fame with his turn as Detective Harry Bosch in the critically acclaimed Bosch, which premiered in 2014, despite being in the industry for over 20 years, starting with a role in an episode of Matlock in 1990. Being an "overnight" sensation could've happened a lot sooner, had more eyes tuned in to his turn as Officer Jack Lowery in Brooklyn South, a cop drama cancelled far too soon.

'Brooklyn South' Was Created by 'NYPD Blue's Team

Brooklyn South was created by producers Steven Bochco and David Milch, the minds behind NYPD Blue. It was, in fact, created as a counterpart to that lauded series, a gritty police drama centered around beat cops instead of the plainclothes detectives of the former. The series focuses on Brooklyn's 74th Precinct, where Sergeant Frank Donovan (Jon Tenney) hands out assignments to the uniformed officers of the precinct: Officer Ann-Marie Kersey (Yancy Butler); burly Officer Phil Roussakoff (Michael DeLuise); the respected Officer Jimmy Doyle (Patrick McGaw); traffic cop Officer Clement Johnson (Richard T. Jones); sensible Desk Sergeant Richard Santoro (Gary Basaraba); and, of course, Welliver's Officer Lowery, the proverbial tough cop struggling with his own demons. Along for the ride is the (Bochco-created) Hill Street Blues alum James B. Sikking as Lt. Stan Jonas.

Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard

Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.

🐕Wick

🏁Fast

🧨Mission

🎄Die Hard

FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →

01

How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.

ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said. BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we're already laughing about something. CI'm the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived. DBy accident. I wasn't supposed to be here, and now I'm the only one who can do anything about it.

NEXT QUESTION →

02

It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.

AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started. BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I'm not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup. CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving. DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don't go down.

NEXT QUESTION →

03

Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.

ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone. BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I'd trade the whole mission for any one of them. CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I'd still take the worst part of the job myself. DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don't know I exist.

NEXT QUESTION →

04

It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.

AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction. BThe people counting on me. I don't appear to have a limit when it's family on the line. CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it's going to be me. DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.

NEXT QUESTION →

05

There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.

AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it. BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion. CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff. DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.

NEXT QUESTION →

06

How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.

AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me. BI don't take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out. CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second. DThey're in a van outside telling me what I'm doing wrong while I'm the one bleeding on broken glass.

NEXT QUESTION →

07

Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.

ASomething was taken from me that can't be replaced, and I've been settling that account ever since. BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I'll defend it with everything. CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don't know how to hand that to anyone else. DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.

NEXT QUESTION →

08

When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.

AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to. BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table. CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me. DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.

REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →

Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.

John Wick

You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.

• The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
• You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
• Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
• People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.

Fast & Furious

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.

• This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
• You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
• You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
• The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

Mission: Impossible

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

• This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
• You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
• You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
• Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

Die Hard

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

• Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
• You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
• You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
• You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

The pilot episode promised to match, perhaps even exceed, the notoriety of NYPD Blue with a jarring, graphic opening shootout between a psychotic gunman, who is taking the lives of police officers and innocent bystanders, and police (the series was the first to land a TV-MA rating). A horrifying image of an officer being shot in the head is the moment of infamy. Officer Doyle is the one who finally disarms the killer and takes him in, while preventing the other cops from exacting revenge. But in a scene that would easily be at home in NYPD Blue, Kersey, whose boyfriend was one of the victims, gets the killer alone in an interview room and repeatedly kicks him in the chest, causing a fatal heart attack.

'Brooklyn South' Deserved Better Than an Early Cancellation

The pilot of Brooklyn South set a high precedent and a comparison to Bochco's other fare that it couldn't live up to. As the season went on, the episodes started getting thinner, with too many characters to keep track of, each with their own trials, and Bochco unable to devote the time to the show he normally would due to personal reasons. CBS also made the questionable decision to air Brooklyn South against powerhouse Monday Night Football on ABC and Dateline: Monday on NBC, and while viewership was respectable, it ranked 74th among series airing at the time.

Bochco and Milch took steps to right the ship, adding a new character in the form of an older cop played by John Finn and focusing more on the personal lives of a smaller subset of characters, particularly those played by Butler, DeLuise, Rodriguez, and Welliver. As Milch explains it, the changes were made with an eye on the strengths of certain pairs and partnerships that were standing out from the others (per The Seattle Times). The changes did appear to be working, but the series was still axed after 22 episodes, earning the anger of Bochco, who threatened to pull out of his four-year, three-series deal with CBS, saying, "I have significant issues with CBS" and complaining that the network didn't support the series needed.

It's hard to argue with Bochco on that front, given CBS placed the show in a doomed time slot, and cancelled it before allowing the changes the creative team made to fully take effect. Brooklyn South had all the trademarks indicative of Bochco's work: quick-cut editing, high-quality visuals, emotional swings, characters with depth, and a gray morality. Had things gone differently, Brooklyn South could have been just as revered as Bochco's other works, and Welliver's immense talent would have had the time to be recognized well before Bosch. But Brooklyn South is a prime example of unfulfilled promise, and, as a result, Bosch is a karmic righting of wrongs for Welliver, long overdue, and certainly not overnight.

Brooklyn South