There are so many cop shows. So many murder shows. So many shows about dead innocent girls who turn out to be less innocent than they seemed. Most wallow uselessly in the suffering of others, real or fictitious. Some precious—Twin Peaks, Sharp objects—transcend the clichés of an exaggerated genre through artistic storytelling and thematic depth. Hulu Under the bridgepremiering on April 17th, does not reach the heights of the last series. But careful, empathetic writing and excellent performances make it more than just another dead girl show.
On the night of November 14, 1997, 14-year-old Reena Virk joined a gathering of teenagers near a bridge in Saanich, British Columbia, and never returned home. Under the bridge adapts, with some creative license, the detective book about the case of Reena, by Rebecca Godfrey, played in the series by executive producer Riley Keough. A writer who grew up in the area but hasn’t visited in years, for reasons that seem related to her brother’s death when they were children, Rebecca is here to research a book she’s been calling about. Victoria Girls. She begins snooping around the local girls’ group home, Seven Oaks, just in time to learn of Reena’s (Vritika Gupta) disappearance.
Hers is just one of many perspectives through which the show filters crime. Flower Moon Assassins Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone co-stars as Cam Bentland, a young police officer working the case alongside her adoptive father, Roy Bentland (Matt Craven), a police chief with a habit of cutting corners and intimidating witnesses to achieve his goals. desired results. Cam, who is Indigenous and spent part of her childhood in Seven Oaks, dreams of escaping this island community through a transfer to Vancouver – a transfer she will likely receive after solving a high-profile case like Reena’s. Two of the friends Reena met on the bridge, Josephine Bell (Chloe Guidry) and Dusty Pace (Aiyana Goodfellow), live in Seven Oaks. Jo is the charismatic and fickle queen bee, a girl obsessed with John Gotti and gangsta rap. Her best friend Kelly Ellard (Izzy G.) rounds out the pseudo-gang they’ve dubbed the “Crip Mafia Cartel.”
Under the bridge also spends a lot of time with the Virks, Jehovah’s Witnesses of Indian descent who are shaken by their daughter’s rebellion long before she disappears. Reena constantly fights with her austere and religious mother, Suman (Archie Panjabi). After the girls at school bully Reena for having hairy legs, Suman shows up for a shave and declares that worrying about something as mundane as what other kids think amounts to “paganism.” Under the bridge creator Quinn Shephard (Its not good) makes nuanced use of the Virks’ hybrid identities, contrasting the specific tensions within the family with the blunt prejudices they face in the community where Suman’s side of the family has lived for three generations. The series establishes this dynamic in the present so effectively that an episode devoted largely to tracing Reena’s roots, from her grandparents’ arrival in British Columbia to her parents dating, feels redundant.
It’s not the only case where the show gives viewers too much information — perhaps in a well-intentioned attempt to do justice to the real story or to the book by Godfrey, who died in 2022. It makes sense, for example, that Cam and Rebecca, who must now collaborate to discover the truth, they grew up together and have a complicated history. But Cam’s story, with his father, has enough details and twists to fuel its own miniseries. And the timing of Rebecca’s return to her hometown, with a manuscript that couldn’t be more relevant to Reena’s case, feels contrived. Under the bridge it can also get silly in its depictions of the author at work. Watching her speak entire paragraphs of grand prose into a recorder, it’s hard not to cringe.
Fortunately, the show is compelling enough to overcome the occasional silly moment. Many crime dramas from the last decade repeat the same conclusions about how race and class intersect with criminal justice systems, but Shephard avoids broad generalizations. She is attentive to the specificity of not only Reena’s background, but also the diverse experiences of all the other characters involved in her story. Stereotypes turn out to be a red herring, both for researchers and viewers. Shephard is also insightful about the way disparate social groups interact with one another: small-town cops, parents of various racial and socioeconomic statuses, teenagers who think they’re tougher, badder, and more gangster than they really are.
The acting is even better than the writing. Gladstone’s Cam hides a lifetime’s anger—about her own upbringing, about her eternal outsider status—beneath an impassive exterior. Keough is a wonderful, morally questionable journalist who manipulates Jo and takes acid with burnt-out teenagers, in part because she hasn’t gotten over her brooding goth phase, but also because she became convinced, when she was the age of the suspects, that she is a person. bad. The younger actors are equally notable. Guidry’s Jo is the kind of girl everyone has met, magnetic and scary at the same time. She is the sun around which Reena, Dusty and Kelly revolve, each in her own completely convincing way. EuphoriaJavon “Wanna” Walton brings empathy to the difficult role of his friend Warren Glowatski. Through these performances, Under the bridge it subverts our assumptions to make a powerful distinction between what people say, what they do, how they are perceived, and who they really are.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
