They both suck.
Things start. You’re hopeful. You watch and keep watching. And they keep getting worse.
So it is with The Bridge and Broadchurch. I apologize.
Bleak doesn’t mean deep. It just means bleak. Which both of these extended melodramas are. Lots of talent expended for no benefit.
In The Bridge, you come to like one character. Nothing can save her. Everyone else deserves what happens to them, which is horrible. They needed 13 episodes to inflict this on us? Mostly you wind up second guessing the writer and director and actors. What were you thinking with this insane plot? How is this not an insultingly stereotyped depiction of a Mexican cop in every particular? Who told the producer and director that Matthew Lillard could act? Why does Anabeth Gish think a softcore porn role might benefit her career? Why is her character in the show in the first place? Why is one relatively minor character doing a fairly gross impersonation of a major character who doesn’t deserve to be mocked in this way? Does anybody involved think this is acting, clever, worthwhile, illuminating, or anything but totally damn dumb and pretentious?
Broadchurch. With The Killing it took me the betrayal at the end of season one to realize I didn’t care who killed the killed girl. With Broadchurch it’s taken only six episodes. I. don’t. care.
If the purpose is to convince me that all English life outside of London is low, venal, meaningless, dull, and sick, I’m convinced. Kill them all. It doesn’t matter what they do or what is done to them. They deserve it.
The boy on the beach died before the show started. I envy him. He’s well out of it. And I’m prepared to believe he got what was coming to him. Yeah, he was a kid. But he was an English kid. He’d have grown up to be like everyone else in the show — a dim, selfish, drab drone who flails at life without ever even being interesting.
Sorry. I got taken in. It happens. Forgive me.
No harm, no foul. I actually tried watching the Bridge a couple of weeks before you first mentioned it. Fell asleep about 1/4 of the way in. Was waiting to hear if it improved but it sounds like my initial instinct was correct.
Thanks for the warning about Broadchurch.
Oh and I’m enjoying Luther so far. Got through the first season and the first episode of the second.
Sorry if this is a bit unrelated to the post, but are some of these shows guilty of bad writing or have we culled the instinct of self-defense from much of our civilization? I was watching the episode of Luther last night where *minor spoiler* a guy walks into an office building and proceeds to murder people at will with a hammer & squirt gun filled with acid. The entire office falls over each other, fleeing in terror as if this skinny little shit was the Dark Lord Sauron.
I looked at the missus and said, “Are you fucking kidding me?” This guy was incredibly outnumbered, with lots of men in the office who were bigger than he was, but they all tucked tail & ran screaming, even abandoning women coworkers to be bludgeoned to death. *end spoiler*
I know we have our issues over here, but I think the bad guy would at least have to be given a working revolver to be taken seriously on an American show. Did Britons watch that episode and think, “Oh man, I would be so terrified if someone showed up at my office brandishing a hammer in a threatening way. Why is anyone allowed to buy a hammer, anyway? Shouldn’t background checks be required? Actually, we should outlaw all hammers!”
No wonder nobody has the stomach to so much as address the exploding mooslim population. Speaking of which, I wonder if any Brit police show will have a case where some mooslims whack the head off of a British soldier on the sidewalk?