It always felt as though the idea of The Bridge was to marry the pulp sensibility of Breaking Bad with the social commentary of The Wire, and during the second season's finest moments - which included most of the back half - the show managed to pull it off, somehow telling a story that could both include a murderous Mennonite-looking woman whose crazed father was held captive and thoughtful exploration of American guilt in the drug wars. That the show took a while to hit that stride shouldn't be surprising; after all, the show's first season was held back by an increasingly silly serial killer storyline that nearly everyone involved regretted, so it's to be expected that the show needed some time to escape that. But for the first half of the season, The Bridge felt so scattered that it was hard to tell what, if anything, it was trying to be about. There were newspaper reporters digging into money storage units, a bearded man trying to help a victimized woman, Marco dealing with the ramifications of being an honest cop in a corrupt force, Sonya dealing with the man who killed her sister, and so on and so forth. I spent a lot of the first half of the season more or less enjoying pieces, but struggled to see what any of it had to do with anything else. But as the season came together, The Bridge hit an incredible stride, and started delivering knockout television. It filled the series with an outstanding supporting cast of characters, turning even the thankless role of a Mexican drug kingpin into something funny, tragic, and beautiful, or fleshing out its government operatives with details like their minifigure painting or their constant eating. Moreover, the storylines started to pay real emotional dividends, paying off long-burning threads in a satisfying way. And the leads delivered and then some, especially Matthew Lillard as an addict journalist who lit up the screen with what's probably his best performance to date. I don't blame FX for canceling The Bridge; the show took a long time to hit its stride, and the fact that so many people bailed before it got there is completely understandable. But for those who stuck with it, we got to see The Bridge fulfill that promising marriage of pulp and social commentary, and it did a great job while it lasted.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
RSS Feed
