Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Under The Bridge’ On Hulu, A Drama About The Real Life Murder Of A Teen In A Small Canadian Town

One of the big promotional points for the new Hulu limited series Under The Bridge is that it stars Lily Gladstone, right after her awards season run for her role in Killers of The Flower Moon. Here, she plays a cop investigating the disappearance of a 14-year-old girl in a small town on the British Columbian island of Victoria. The show is based on a true story from 1997 that has a ton of layers to it. How well does this series translate those layers to the screen?

UNDER THE BRIDGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As a car drives down a dark road, a voice says, “On its face, this story is the opposite of a fairy tale. But that’s only until you consider what fairy tales are really about.”

The Gist: “November 14, 1997.” On the British Columbian island of Victoria, in the town of Saanich, 14-year-old Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) gets picked up by her uncle Raj (Anoop Desai) outside her middle school. He’s gotten her the latest Biggie Smalls album as a gift. When he finds out she still hangs out with Dusty Pace (Aiyana Goodfellow), one of the girls from the Seven Oaks group home, he suggests she should make time to reconnect with her family. She gets out of the car while it’s moving and walks to Seven Oaks.

Reena is still completely disconnected from her parents, Suman (Archie Panjabi) and Manjit (Ezra Faroque Khan). and her return from Seven Oaks has been rough. Before dinner, she calls numbers from the book of a fellow Seven Oaks resident, Josephine Bell (Chloe Guidry), with whom she’s butted heads, telling people nasty things about Jo. Then she gets a call during dinner about a party at the house of Connor Fields (Jared Ager-Foster) and just leaves.

The call is a ruse, as Jo is out to get back at Reena for taking her stuff; Jo and other girls start chasing after her and drag her “under the bridge,” which is the bridge to and from the island, to beat her up.

At the same time, Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough) arrives on the island and her parents’ house on the lake. She grew up on the island, and is writing a book about the girls who lived in Seven Oaks and other group homes. She doesn’t exactly have a great relationship with her parents, especially her mother, and the entire Godfrey family suffered a loss before she left the island years ago.

After Reena doesn’t come home for three days, Raj and Manjit go to the Saanich police. Deputy Cam Bentland (Lily Gladstone) and her brother, Deputy Scott Bentland (Daniel Diemer), are a bit skeptical, given that plenty of teens on the island run away from home. After speaking to Connor, one of the names in Jo’s book, about what happened that night at the party, she sees CCTV footage of Reena getting dragged under the bridge. She asks the chief, her father Roy (Matt Craven), for divers to look for Reena, or at least evidence that something happened. The divers end up finding articles of her clothing, but no body.

As part of her research for her book, Rebecca goes to Seven Oaks and befriends Dusty and Josephine. This is when she learns that the residents of Seven Oaks are called “Bic girls” because they’re considered to be disposable.

When Cam and the rest of the Saanich police start questioning people who were at the party that night, Jo calls on Rebecca to be her “guardian” with the police. But Rebecca wants to avoid interacting with Cam, whom she knew from her younger days on the island.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Despite being based on the true story portrayed in Godfrey’s book of the same name, Under The Bridge gives us a big Pretty Little Liars vibe.

Our Take: If you read up on the Reena Virk case, you know that there were a lot of people involved in her death, and that the case took a lot of twists and turns. But there’s also the story of the Virk family and the dynamic within it, including their conversion to Jehovah’s Witnesses and the circumstances that led Reena to spend time at Seven Oaks. Under The Bridge is set to include all of these aspects and twists, with the first episode accomplishing a lot of the complicated exposition in this story by showing and not telling.

Creator Quinn Shephard and showrunner Samir Mehta start with Reena’s disappearance, so the stakes are immediately ramped up. This is important, because there is so much more to the story that comes before it. We get just enough information about Reena and the situation she’s in; she was in a group home, she’s fallen in with a questionable group and she is not getting along with her family. Once Reena’s uncle and father approach the police and Cam starts looking into it, we have an idea who the players are even if we’re not sure exactly what happened.

There are other recent shows that have kept details like this mysterious, and it’s been frustrating to watch. Here, the crux of the story is Reena’s disappearance, and Shephard and Mehta don’t tiptoe around it or try to be cute with it.

By the end of the first episode, we’re just getting an idea of how involved Keough’s and Gladstone’s characters are going to be involved in this investigation, and how they’ll end up being connected. But there’s something in each of their pasts that gives them incentive to get further involved beyond just being a journalist and a cop, respectively.

What we appreciated about the first episode is that the tangential — but important — aspects of the story are left to be picked up in later episodes. Again, if you read up on the Virk case you know the reasons for why a seemingly good kid from a good family ended up in a group home, and we’re curious to see how that is handled, as well as the backstories of Cam, Rebecca and even the girls that attacked Reena.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Cam is shocked when she sees CCTV footage of a staggering Reena emerge from under the bridge. Then we see her staggering over the bridge in real time. Nirvana’s “Something In The Way” plays.

Sleeper Star: Archie Panjabi has a thankless role as Reena’s mother Suman. While she’ll likely be a big driver of the investigation into Reena’s disappearance, and she feels the most bitter about the falling out Reena has had with the family. We hope she gets more to do than just being the rueful mother.

Most Pilot-y Line: Jo has pictures of John Gotti in a locket around her neck. We know she wants to be a gangster of some sort, but the desire to actually work for Gotti is a bit strange.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Under The Bridge has more than enough complications to make for compelling drama, and the first episode gives viewers just enough information about the case to hook them in without getting them frustrated.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.