Under The Bridge: Not A Good Choice to Make Into A Series
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Hulu’s new drama series Under The Bridge is a based on the book from Rebecca Godfrey, and is a true crime story, of sorts.
It follows a group of lost, throw away, bully teens with serious mental health issues, who are often left to their own devices. When they are drunk one night, they mercilessly target and beat up the newest member of their group Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta).
When Reena goes missing, the kids become prime suspects in a dragged out series that overly protects its answers to a painful fault.
Whodunit?
Riley Keough plays Rebecca Godfrey, who is a writer living in New York. In the fall of 1997, Rebecca returns to her hometown, a small island community called Victoria in British Columbia.
She is writing a new book based on the troubled teens of the area, and just happens to get there, right as the investigation starts, when the police bring in the teens for questioning.
Josephine (Chloe Guidry), the toxic “queen bee” of the gang and the spitting image of a young Theresa Russell, is a teen from a broken family, who lives in a girls group home with another of the primary “gang” members, Dusty (Aiyanna Goodfellow).
Kelly Ellard (Izzy G.), is a rich girl, full of narcissistic psychopathy, and is Josephine’s “best friend”, who basically does anything she wants and her family protects her.
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When they ask Reena, a lonely, naive girl of strict Jehovah Witness background, referred with bigotry by multiple characters as a “big girl”, Reena jumps at the chance to belong.
She is wholly influenced and seduced into a group that is hellbent on being “Crips”, who cause trouble to emulate and gain the attention of notorious NYC gangster John Gotti.
When Josephine excludes Reena from a party, just because she can, Reena steals her private phone contacts and recklessly starts calling everyone in the book, tearing Josephine down, and spreading vicious rumors.
When Josephine finds out, she invites Reena to the party, having set up the group and a few others to beat her up.
The search
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When Reena doesn’t return home, her father Manjit (Ezra Faroque Kahn) and Uncle Raj (Anoop Desai) report her missing to Detective Cam Bentland (Lily Gladstone). At first glance she brushes it off as something that teen runaways do all the time, but seeing their earnest sincerity, she starts to investigate.
Cam doesn’t have much to start with except a couple of names, but it leads her down an excruciatingly long and twisted search among the townsfolk, that takes her places she never thought she’d go.
She learns that her old friend Rebecca is back home, also investigating this for her new book. Hoping to cooperate with her, Cam attempts to get Rebecca to help her with what she knows, but Rebecca basically refuses.
Rebecca tries to set up a camaraderie with the teens, including bonding with one of the boys, Warren (Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton), another suspect, who apparently reminds her of her brother Gabriel, who died when she was young.
Rebecca too comes from a jaded past, and does her best to help the teens, but mostly for selfish reasons.
When Reena’s body shows up in the river, the town scrambles to figure out what happened and who exactly is responsible.
In all Honesty…
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Under The Bridge simply doesn’t have enough intrigue or surprises to be pulled off well as a series. What is set up in the first two episodes is about as interesting as it gets.
The length of each episode, logging in at 45-50 minutes, is wholly unnecessary given the lack of material it has. There simply wasn’t enough to carry each episode in an engaging way, so it seemed loaded with unnecessary fillers that were either boring or frustratingly dragged out.
Rebecca’s character seemed utterly useless to the story overall, and added nothing to it except more depression and a tiny bit of information useful to the case. She spends her time sulking, struck by a past that isn’t redeemable by her involvement in the case.
She also blocks the investigation by lying to the police, for reasons not fully fleshed out, and, Warren, whom she supposedly “bonds” with, has nothing to do with her past tragedy, so we are left wondering why she engaged with him, or even what drew her to write this book in the first place.
What was it that got her attention? Just because other teens on the island were messed up like she used to be? Rebecca didn’t do the things that these teens do, as far as what is presented to us, so what are we missing?
The series takes way too much time trying to conceal the evidence and the perpetrator(s) using mumbly teens and Rebecca saying “I don’t know”, looking and acting sheepish, hemming and hawing and avoiding questions.
I understand that, of course, no one wants to confess, but the degree to which Rebecca doesn’t help the cops, without us knowing what her motive is, is just silly. The kids are also given such a toxic degree of indifference that literally nothing shakes them, which is utterly unlikely.
Near the last 3-4 episodes, we already know who is responsible, so the ending isn’t shocking at all. There was simply no need to go that long, painfully trying to conceal the answers, and the story needed a rework to add more excitement and a sense of realism not portrayed here.
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Then, the ending itself was so unsatisfying it made me wonder why this particular investigation was chosen to make into a series. They claim that it was based on a true story, and that there were things added for “dramatic purposes”, but other than the murder there isn’t much drama.
The reason used by the show to explain the fantastical amount apathy the teens feel about their acts is the trauma cliche, but some of the kids don’t have any trauma and are still rotten.
And, as most of us who have worked with kids in mental health know, plenty of traumatized kids don’t ever go to such destructive lengths to keep up what essentially is a glorified facade.
The series does emphasize the ongoing struggle in the world that we all face daily, in that those with privilege have more resources available to them when the proverbial shit hits the fan, and others get the short end of the stick.
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Even with that, the series fails to weave it in as a pernicious undertone, instead it just shrugs and throws it out there like an afterthought, at the end. This gives it more of a feeling that “it is what it is” and we just have to accept it, rather than anything really being worked out.
This may have been a better choice for a film so we could just get to the action, rather than meandering ad nauseum, and forcefully withholding tiny bits of truth only to finish with an ending that fizzles like a dud firework. When the main character is basically unessential, why do it at all?
The value of this story, if there was one, completely alluded me, so that even the strong acting couldn’t save it from its lack of energy and unsurprising circumstances.
Of all of the characters in this series, only Cam’s character had something surprising revealed to her, but literally no one else seemed any different when it’s finally wrapped up, with exception of their location.
Overall, this series isn’t worth the nearly eight hour commitment it took to get through it. I recommend skipping it for a series that is.
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