Omari Hardwick’s “Bosch” Prequel Sets January Premiere

Omari Hardwick is putting on a badge. MGM+ shared photos from “Bosch: Start of Watch,” with a January 10, 2027 premiere, JoBlo reported.

Hardwick plays veteran Eli Bridges opposite Cameron Monaghan’s rookie Harry Bosch. Set in 1992 Los Angeles, the eight-episode season follows patrol work, a heist and police corruption. Two episodes arrive at launch, followed by weekly releases through February 21.

The role puts Hardwick on the other side of the law from James “Ghost” St. Patrick. AllHipHop covered his casting in “Power” in 2013, when he landed the lead in the Starz drama. Ghost owned a nightclub and ran a drug business while trying to go straight. 50 Cent was an executive producer and Courtney Kemp Agboh created the series and served as its showrunner.

Hardwick later spent time in jail to study the life his character faced in season four. In a 2017 appearance on “Live! with Kelly and Ryan,” covered by AllHipHop, he said he stayed for two or three nights with help from a producer and a warden. He described hearing prisoners at night while he was writing and working on an album. Hardwick said he felt more open as an artist that season than at any earlier point in his 14 years of acting.

The “Bosch” role brings him into a TV franchise built around Michael Connelly’s books. Titus Welliver played the detective for seven seasons of the original show and three seasons of “Bosch: Legacy.” Readers first met Harry Bosch in Connelly’s 1992 novel The Black Echo, long before this look at his early police work.

Connelly, an executive producer on the prequel, told Kirkus that the project gave him a chance to explore a stretch of the character’s life that had never appeared in a book. That meant writing new material for Bosch rather than adapting an existing novel.

The setting also has a personal connection for the author. Connelly worked as a reporter in Los Angeles during that period. He described 1992 as a year remembered for injustice and rebellion, while good deeds faded from view. In his telling, young Bosch would see a city the author had once covered himself.