U.S.|‘The Bridge’ Isn’t Real; It Just Seems That Way
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Texas Monthly
By Andy Langer
Last year, the FX program “The Bridge” won a Peabody Award for “raising awareness of border issues,” and many of the plotlines were based on the realities of life in El Paso and its violence-stricken Mexican sister city a bridge away, Ciudad Juárez.
The program touched on drug cartel violence, labor issues and the hundreds of women who have been murdered or gone missing in and around Ciudad Juárez since the mid-1990s. The second season started last month amid headlines of the child and family migrant crisis in which thousands of unaccompanied Central American minors have crossed into the United States.
Yet producing a torn-from-the-headlines program was not what Elwood Reid, the lead writer and executive producer, intended. The first season opened on a border bridge where two bodies were discovered, each cut in half at the waist. One was a missing girl from Mexico, the other an anti-immigration Texas judge. The dual murders forced detectives from both sides of the border to work together to solve the crime. As the plot thickened, the Central Intelligence Agency was linked to Mexico’s drug cartels.
“We do entertainment, not documentary,” said Mr. Reid, who has written three crime novels and came to “The Bridge” after co-producing and writing for “Hawaii Five-0.” “We don’t do issue episodes. Issues are threaded into the narrative, but if you pull that out, the narrative still stands on its own. I don’t want to ever be the show that forces you to eat your vegetables, like, ‘Let’s all learn about immigration from a Hollywood liberal.’ I’m suspicious when that kind of stuff is fed to me, so I don’t want to feed it to other people.”
The program was not even inspired by the Mexico-American border. The series is an adaptation of “Bron/Broen,” a popular Scandinavian series set on the border of Sweden and Denmark. (The original opens with a similar plotline). FX would have set it at the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, if Mr. Reid and his co-producer for the first season, the “Cold Case” creator Meredith Stiehm, had not objected.
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