Finding Humanity ‘Under the Bridge’: The Hit Hulu Series’ Creators Unearth Compassion in True Crime

Beneath a waterway bridge, teen girls trade secrets and cigarettes, swagger and bite. Too young to know how truly young they are, they spew threats and follow through in seconds. One burns another on her forehead, then slaps and punches the girl. The others pile on, an unrelenting wave.

Hulu’s limited series Under the Bridge dramatizes the 1997 murder of fourteen-year-old Reena Virk, an East Indian girl whose immigrant parents and Jehovah’s Witness faith made her an outsider. Beaten and drowned, Reena was missing for about a week before police recovered her body. Authorities eventually charged seven girls and one boy.

Yet while Reena’s death and its aftermath rocked the small Canadian community of Victoria, Under the Bridge isn’t much of a whodunit. It’s all about why, a deliberate, thoughtful examination of tragedy that’s a compelling and compassionate crime drama—and an example of responsible storytelling in a genre often known for sensationalism.

“It’s a story where the catalyst is a crime and is focused around a crime. But it’s also a very human story that explores a lot of really interesting themes about coming of age and radical forgiveness and empathy,” said series creator Quinn Shephard (Not Okay).

Based on the late Rebecca Godfrey’s 2009 book of the same name, Under the Bridge stars Riley Keough (Daisy Jones & The Six) as Godfrey, Oscar-nominee Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) as investigator Cam Bentland, Vritika Gupta as Reena, and Chloe Guidry (Wayward) as Josephine, the mafia-obsessed queen bee among the girls Reena wanted as friends.

Audiences and critics have applauded the series, which ranks among the twenty-five most popular streaming shows. The Playlist highlighted its “nuanced” characters and performances while TIME magazine praised Shephard for being “perceptive, too, about the way discrete social groups interact among themselves: small-town police, parents of various racial and socioeconomic statuses, teenage girls who think they’re tougher and meaner and more gangster than they really are.”

We met with Shephard and fellow showrunner Samir Mehta (Fear the Walking Dead) over Zoom to learn how they brought Under the Bridge’s humanity and emotion to the surface.

“A Symptom of a Larger Disease”

True crime stories or those inspired by them, such as The Staircase, The Dropout, and Netflix’s latest, Baby Reindeer, have been in demand since the pandemic, but crime dramas are perennially prevalent. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (or SVU), which first aired in 1999, is the longest-running live-action scripted prime-time series on American television. Recently renewed, it averages 11.2 million viewers. Other crime dramas such as Blue Bloods and FBI consistently land in Nielsen’s weekly top ten.

I worked as a daily crime reporter for ten years, so I’m often mystified by viewers’ fascination with this genre. Sociologist and author Danielle Lindemann recently told The Wrap that reality TV and true-crime-related shows have a “tantalizing blend of proximity to, and distance from, the people involved.” In other words, the characters are enough “like us” to relate to their extraordinary circumstances but different enough to offer “a certain voyeuristic relief.”

Yet Under the Bridge’s strength is in its closeness, its empathy for Reena as well as her attackers. To accomplish this, Mehta said they considered the crime itself “a symptom of a larger disease.”

“It’s an aspect of crime that I think really gets kind of ignored in favor of some of the more salacious details and kind of the surface level, like who’s getting arrested, who’s going to jail,” he said. “Justice seems to be viewed that way, rather than a wider, more wise perspective, which is justice is served if humanity and society gets better. That’s what this story was communicating and what we really wanted to put on the screen.”

Alive in the Story, Not a Plot Device

Producer Tara Duncan originally brought Godfrey’s book to Shephard’s attention. Godfrey was researching troubled youths in Victoria, where she’d grown up, for her next novel when news of Reena’s death broke. Godfrey became captivated, and her resulting book weaves exhaustive research and interviews with lyrical descriptions, such as when she wrote Reena possessed “a rare combination of boldness and innocence,” calling her “dark skinned and heavy in a town and time that valued the thin and the blonde.”

Shephard worked with Godfrey on crafting the limited series for roughly two years before Godfrey’s death in 2022. She admired how Godfrey challenged readers to look deeper than the salacious headlines that played up the offenders’ youth and tapped into their relatable insecurities and ambivalence.

When you’re twelve to fifteen years old, “it feels like life or death if your friends don’t want you to sit at their lunch table anymore,” she added. “It’s why we wanted the kids, the actors, to be true to age in the show, and we wanted to kind of hold space for all of those emotions having gone into something like this happening.”

The writers also drew from the 2011 book Reena: A Father’s Story by Manjit Virk, Reena’s dad, to center Reena as “a character who is alive in the story, not just someone whose body washes up, who’s a plot device,” Mehta said.

“It required us to have a lot of conversations about Reena’s emotional interior each step of the way. What was her headspace? What led her inch by inch to her end? Obviously, there are the actions of the perpetrators. But we were also just interested in what caused her to want to even seek comfort in them in the first place,” he said. “So much of what happened was that need to go find someone who would accept her, and then she just fell into the exact wrong crowd.”

“Other People’s Memories of Truth”

While the writers were intentional with cliffhangers and reveals, they said they didn’t want to make the show propulsive in a way that didn’t feel intentional to a larger theme. Keough as Godfrey relays it toward the end: Mercy alone transforms the human heart.

“We didn’t want to throw red herrings in the story and just have it be a puzzle box,” which didn’t feel authentic to the real people and events involved, Shephard said. “A lot of the way that we dole out the information in the show … was also about mimicking an emotional journey for the audience, where you actually are shifting your own perspective and your own feelings about things or feeling challenged by the reveals of the episodes rather than just seeing them as puzzle pieces.”

They also wanted the audience to experience what the characters’ might have felt in different situations instead of just relaying facts.

“You’re ultimately adapting other people’s memories of truth,” Shephard said. “You’re adapting how they remembered and experienced it.”

The best way to craft a well-developed story, they decided, was to put in all the perspectives. “[T]he truth actually sits kind of silently with the audience,” Mehta said. “We never actually say, ‘This is what happened.’ We say, ‘Here are all of the mosaic of points of view.’ And then what that makes you feel is the truth for you, sitting in your home, on the other side of the screen.”

The Human Element

For writers interested in adapting true crime stories, they suggested looking beyond the facts or news reports that catch people’s attention.

“Look at the human element, kind of the emotionality contained within the story, and ask yourself, ‘Is there some greater purpose to telling this? Am I actually exploring some aspect of the human condition that’s worth telling that goes beyond the shock value?’ I’d say that’s a good litmus test. If that isn’t there, then it’s probably not the right story to explore,” Mehta said.

Remember, while viewers might find such stories thrilling, “there’s no element of that for the people whose lives have been affected by it. It’s disorienting and full of grief in a very intense and very human way,” Shephard said. “And when you enter a story like this, you become a part of it; you enter the orbit of that energy, and it impacts you. And I think if it doesn’t impact you, then maybe you really aren’t emotionally equipped to be working in true crime, because then you’re doing it from a purely sensational perspective.”

Being close to such intensity creates doubts beyond the typical ones, they added. “It’ll affect you, for sure,” Shephard said. “I was super self-critical of my own process. I also walked away being like, ‘I will never work in true crime again.’”

“Yeah, I’m not sure either of us would ever do it again,” Mehta added. “If you do it, be prepared for it to be the last time.”

Under the Bridge is available on Hulu, with the series finale airing on May 29, 2024.