With Titus Welliver increasingly taking a backseat in Prime Video’s Bosch franchise, fans of the actor have been wondering what’s next for his career. After all, Harry Bosch is the character against whom every Welliver performance will be measured from now on. The gruff, no-nonsense, and fiercely determined LAPD homicide detective feels like a role he was born to play.
Yet, the actor has already found a replacement character with many of the same characteristics as Bosch, albeit with some fundamental differences, too. The figure in question is one of the main characters in a new mobster drama on MGM+. The Westies sees Titus Welliver playing another cop, by the name of Glenn Keenan.
Even just a handful of episodes into the show, Keenan is fast becoming one of Welliver’s best TV characters, and is allowing him to explore different elements of his acting range beyond the franchise protagonist he’s been playing for the past 12 years. What’s more, in J. K. Simmons, he has the perfect foil for the latest law enforcer he’s portraying.
Although The Westies initially focuses on the dynamic between Simmons and Tom Brittney’s gangster characters, it’s the childhood friendship between mob boss Eamon Sweeney and Glenn Keenan that ultimately binds the whole story of the series together. We’re bound to see Keenan put in some especially difficult positions later as the show’s first season builds towards its climax.
The Westies Features Titus Welliver As A Cop The Opposite Of Harry Bosch
Despite the superficial similarities between the two, Titus Welliver’s Westies character is essentially the anti-Harry Bosch. Whereas Bosch grew up in Los Angeles, and later served on the police force of his home city, Keenan is from the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York, and is an officer for the NYPD.
In addition to hailing from opposite sides of the United States, the two cops have very different ideas about morality. Bosch is an implacable adherent to truth and justice. He can’t stand liars, and stops at nothing in his pursuit of what he believes to be right. Keenan, on the other hand, has a hard time telling right from wrong.
He has a particular soft spot for the leader of the Westies, the Irish street gang in his local neighborhood, as its leader Eamon Sweeney was his childhood friend. This soft spot means that Keenan is inclined to let Sweeney’s gang get away with actions he knows are criminal.
He’s grown up in an environment where the law appears to be a gray area, and as a lowly, middle-aged beat cop he has no real reason to believe in the job he’s doing anymore. However, Keenan’s police department is inevitably going to test his loyalty to the badge at some stage, meaning that he’ll have a tough decision to make.
Glenn Keenan Is Welliver’s Best Post-Bosch Role So Far
Titus Welliver hasn’t departed the Bosch franchise just yet, but his role in it is becoming increasingly marginalized. Welliver will be making cameo appearances as Harry Bosch in Ballard season 2, but he has nothing to do with the franchise’s upcoming prequel series Bosch: Start of Watch, in which Cameron Monaghan will be playing his character.
At the same time, he’s already been expanding his horizons on the small screen, to compelling effect. Welliver plays antagonist Dominic McNair in Dark Winds season 4, adding a new dimension to the acclaimed Western crime drama. Still, his character won’t be returning for another season, reinforcing the sense that Glenn Keenan is his most important post-Bosch role.
The dramatic tension within Keenan as a character allows Welliver to draw on layers of emotional complexity that he’s developed in his previous performances as Harry Bosch and Brooklyn South police officer Jack Lowery. But The Westies also brings something entirely fresh to his career, by plunging his crooked cop character into the heart of a murky criminal underworld.
- Release Date
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July 12, 2026
- Network
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MGM+
- Showrunner
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Chris Brancato
