Crossing The Line

If you've been able to see the Swedish/Danish production Bron/Broen, it will be obvious to you why American networks and producers wanted to adapt it for North American audiences: the plot is bananas, and the cops' clashing styles -- one a cuddly family man, the other an awkward singleton haunted by her past -- has built-in tension independent of the case they're working together. And while a lot of the original story made it to our shores, it might be a relief to those working on it that the original source material has been used up, and that they can work on their own ideas now, without getting too anxious about the original. The question is what kind of show we'll get next year.

When I say "the plot is bananas," if you watched this season of The Bridge on FX, you're probably like, "Sure, that shit is elaborate and complicated," and it is -- or was. In the original, the season is only ten episodes long and wraps up without really leaving any dangling plot threads to carry the production, and the viewer, into a new season, whereas here, the apprehension of the primary target of the investigation -- the former David Tate, now Kenneth Hastings (Eric Lange) -- occurred with two more episodes left in the season. And this is what makes me wonder how the show is going to change: while the story of Tate/Hastings was the story of a cartoonish, nearly-all-powerful supervillain with seemingly unlimited resources with which to carry out his almost comically diabolical plot, the story of the lost girls of Juarez, which appears as though it will be the primary topic of the show's next season, is all too real. And maybe now that the intricately complex massacre is over, The Bridge can become the thing it was pretending to be all along.

Americans have a choice when it comes to cop shows; actually, we have a few dozen choices. There are carefully observed, nearly sociological studies, like The Wire. There's high camp, like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. There are stylish, superficial takes full of pretty people, like White Collar (yes, I know that's the FBI, but you know what I mean). There are comedies, like Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Until recently, there was even one cop show full of sailors; now there are two! (Soon there will be three.) So when it came to setting the tone for The Bridge, I think producers looked at the setting -- the prosperous north, the terrifying south -- and decided they had to aim for The Wire. But when you're dealing with the kind of killer who would do something as crazy as stage two body-halves to pass for one corpse...an SVU approach might have been more fitting.

Tone aside, the show's first season got a lot right. I already wrote about the relationship between Sonya (Diane Kruger) and Wade (Ted Levine), which only grew deeper and more beautiful -- mostly due to him, if I'm being honest -- over the course of the season; the two had a nice moment in the finale as he gave her a chance to calm her anxiety by brushing one of his horses, and his giving a temporary home to Eva (Stephanie Sigman) gave us a glimpse at what their relationship was like when she first came to live with him. It's almost like the reason Sonya's upset now isn't that she lost a race against the clock to save her partner's son from slowly being drowned in a huge tank behind a false wall. As said partner, Demián Bichir did heartbreaking work with his character's grief at the loss of his son -- and his (understandable) abandonment by his wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno), who took their daughters with her. It's almost as though his son's murder wasn't the final violent insult in a scheme -- in which, what, twenty-some-odd people were collateral damage -- that amounted to nothing much more than the revenge of a cuckold.

As the season finale was winding down, I felt pretty sure that between the detectives' turning their attention to the lost girls, the redemption of a newly dignified Steven Linder (Thomas M. Wright), and Charlotte Millwright (Annabeth Gish) taking the affirmative choice to become a crime boss, The Bridge might actually earn a comparison to The Wire -- on a smaller scale, and minus the moments of comic relief, but in terms of its panoptical take on a criminal ecosystem. And it would have gotten away with it, if not for that final scene in which Marco (Bichir) visited cartel boss Fausto Galvan (Ramón Franco) and announced his intention to find Tate in prison and murder him. Great: now it's a soap again -- just one we're supposed to take extremely seriously. Let's hope producers take the summer to decide that Marco's plan is actually a means for him to infiltrate Galvan's operation -- something other than that Marco is so desperate to slake his own blood lust that he'll use a murderer and rapist to do it. If we're going to have to deal with the trash-TV trope of a Dirty Cop who's doing The Wrong Thing for The Right Reasons, setting his vengeance plot against the backdrop of real people's murders is going to be pretty hard to watch.