The Lincoln Lawyer may be coming to an end with Season 5, but there’s a perfect replacement series on the way. The books of Michael Connelly have turned into big business in the streaming era. Bosch, starring Titus Welliver, was one of Prime Video’s first original hits, launching all the way back in 2014(!), and running until 2021. It led to two spinoffs, Bosch: Legacy and Ballard, and its success was surely a factor in Netflix green lighting The Lincoln Lawyer, which debuted in 2022.
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Though being on rival streamers ruled out any crossovers (in the books, Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller are half-brothers), both have become major successes, pulling in millions of views. Now, The Lincoln Lawyer creator and showrunner, David E. Kelley, has his next adaptation lined up: as per Deadline, he’s bringing Connelly’s 2024 crime novel Nightshade to HBO Max as a procedural titled Welcome To Catalina. This one centers on Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell, who is assigned to a low-stakes post of Catalina Island, when he gets word of a body found in the bottom of the harbor.
Welcome To Catalina Continues Great TV Trends
Kelly will write and serve as executive producer with his David E. Kelly Productions banner, alongside the same Lincoln Lawyer team at A+E Studios, so that’s already a good sign for it reaching a similar level of quality. He also has previous in creating buzzy hits for HBO, having brought Big Little Lies to the network, while his TV resume stretches back to the 1980s and includes Doogie Howser, M.D., Ally McBeal, Presumed Innocent, and Apple TV’s recent hit, Margot’s Got Money Troubles.
What’s also notable is that the plan for Welcome to Catalina is designed as a procedural that will return for a new season each year, with longer episode orders than typical streaming shows and lower costs. This is what HBO and HBO Max have done brilliantly with The Pitt, which is arguably the best show of the last two years, and that is reportedly the model for this series. That’s not to say it’ll be as great, but having these kinds of shows coming back every year, when so many series have huge gaps between seasons, is a good return to how TV used to be.
Interestingly, this isn’t Kelly’s first attempt at bringing Catalina Island to the small screen. He was previously working on an adaptation of Avalon, Connelly’s short story that introduced the setting, at ABC, but it was eventually scrapped. With two books about Stilwell having been written so far (the other is 2026’s Ironwood), there’s already material for a couple of seasons, and presumably much more to come, meaning this could easily have a similar lifespan to the likes of The Lincoln Lawyer and Bosch.
The Lincoln Lawyer is expected to return on Netflix sometime in 2027. Bosch is available to stream on Prime Video. Welcome to Catalina does not yet have a release date.
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