the pilot of The Bridge
I really am on hiatus. But...
A couple of weeks ago I commented that I felt incapable of watching Aaron Douglas's new show. But for whatever reason, I found myself sitting down in front of the television with my dinner right as the pilot began to air (in the Maritimes, the feed of which I get; here it's an hour later and should just be finishing up, but I've been sitting with my thoughts about it for 45 minutes or so). So I figured I'd watch for a few minutes while I ate, and I soon found myself both intrigued and pleasantly surprised.
The premise of The Bridge is that Aaron Douglas plays Frank Leo, the head of the Toronto police union. It's no The Wire, but it's a show more along those lines--a drama about characters who are police officers, complete with lots of moral ambiguity--than on the lines of a procedural. Lots of politicking and intrigue and grey areas. And I really like what they're doing with the city. It's not just set in Toronto, it's set in a very particular part of Toronto. The eponymous bridge is the Bloor Street Viaduct, and the show plays on the juxtaposition of Rosedale, one of the city's richest neighbourhoods, and St. James Town, one of the city's poorest. I haven't watched much Flashpoint, I admit, but I remember being a little frustrated by the way that show, in the early episodes I did watch, threw lots of recognizable Toronto landmarks together in a way that made little geographical sense. So far, The Bridge is not falling into that trap at all. This is a show about Toronto made by people who really live here, I would suspect. And while the protagonists are all white (*SIGH*), in general there's a decent sense of the awareness that the majority of people who live in this city are not. It could do better on that front, but it wasn't awful.
So I watched for an hour and 55 minutes thinking that I would have to eat my words, that maybe I could enjoy this show and get past my hate-on for Aaron Douglas in the wake of BSG, that the city itself might make it worth it, and hey, I wasn't actually all that turned off by Douglas's character, and the premise of the show was working for me. And then they might have blown it in the last five minutes. Because at the end of the pilot, one of Frank's friends and fellow police officers shows up on his doorstep, in a panic, because...wait for it...he has accidentally killed his wife. And Frank (Douglas's character) pulls this whole brothers-in-arms, we'll-fix-this act that absolutely triggered everything I hated about Tyrol at the end and everything that infuriated me about the way Douglas handled what happened to Tyrol at the end, and the camera pans to the wife's corpse (in the car) and then back to the two men sitting on the porch, and Frank sort of claps his buddy on the back, and just YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME, AARON DOUGLAS!!!!!
So.
I'm torn, in a way, because I really did enjoy it enough to want to give it another look until that moment. But now I'm not at all sure I can. Probably for the best, since it's not like I have time, anyway.
I'd heard something at some point that this was getting picked up by a US network--is that true? Have y'all in the States heard anything about it? Incidentally, it feels very Canadian to me--unlike, for instance, Flashpoint, which felt, at least in the eps I saw, to always have its simultaneous American pick-up in mind. But all the union stuff doesn't track in the same way in the US, I don't think, and the question of police brutality doesn't track in the same way in the US, either, and we get a casual reference to gay marriage in the first five minutes, and, well, the setting is very front-and-centre. I like all of those aspects, but it does make me curious how it will work for American viewers, if it gets picked up there.
A couple of weeks ago I commented that I felt incapable of watching Aaron Douglas's new show. But for whatever reason, I found myself sitting down in front of the television with my dinner right as the pilot began to air (in the Maritimes, the feed of which I get; here it's an hour later and should just be finishing up, but I've been sitting with my thoughts about it for 45 minutes or so). So I figured I'd watch for a few minutes while I ate, and I soon found myself both intrigued and pleasantly surprised.
The premise of The Bridge is that Aaron Douglas plays Frank Leo, the head of the Toronto police union. It's no The Wire, but it's a show more along those lines--a drama about characters who are police officers, complete with lots of moral ambiguity--than on the lines of a procedural. Lots of politicking and intrigue and grey areas. And I really like what they're doing with the city. It's not just set in Toronto, it's set in a very particular part of Toronto. The eponymous bridge is the Bloor Street Viaduct, and the show plays on the juxtaposition of Rosedale, one of the city's richest neighbourhoods, and St. James Town, one of the city's poorest. I haven't watched much Flashpoint, I admit, but I remember being a little frustrated by the way that show, in the early episodes I did watch, threw lots of recognizable Toronto landmarks together in a way that made little geographical sense. So far, The Bridge is not falling into that trap at all. This is a show about Toronto made by people who really live here, I would suspect. And while the protagonists are all white (*SIGH*), in general there's a decent sense of the awareness that the majority of people who live in this city are not. It could do better on that front, but it wasn't awful.
So I watched for an hour and 55 minutes thinking that I would have to eat my words, that maybe I could enjoy this show and get past my hate-on for Aaron Douglas in the wake of BSG, that the city itself might make it worth it, and hey, I wasn't actually all that turned off by Douglas's character, and the premise of the show was working for me. And then they might have blown it in the last five minutes. Because at the end of the pilot, one of Frank's friends and fellow police officers shows up on his doorstep, in a panic, because...wait for it...he has accidentally killed his wife. And Frank (Douglas's character) pulls this whole brothers-in-arms, we'll-fix-this act that absolutely triggered everything I hated about Tyrol at the end and everything that infuriated me about the way Douglas handled what happened to Tyrol at the end, and the camera pans to the wife's corpse (in the car) and then back to the two men sitting on the porch, and Frank sort of claps his buddy on the back, and just YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME, AARON DOUGLAS!!!!!
So.
I'm torn, in a way, because I really did enjoy it enough to want to give it another look until that moment. But now I'm not at all sure I can. Probably for the best, since it's not like I have time, anyway.
I'd heard something at some point that this was getting picked up by a US network--is that true? Have y'all in the States heard anything about it? Incidentally, it feels very Canadian to me--unlike, for instance, Flashpoint, which felt, at least in the eps I saw, to always have its simultaneous American pick-up in mind. But all the union stuff doesn't track in the same way in the US, I don't think, and the question of police brutality doesn't track in the same way in the US, either, and we get a casual reference to gay marriage in the first five minutes, and, well, the setting is very front-and-centre. I like all of those aspects, but it does make me curious how it will work for American viewers, if it gets picked up there.