Rebecca Godfrey, the Real Person and the Character

One thing that has become clear while looking into the adaptive process for Under the Bridge is that the show’s co-creator, Quinn Shephard, worked very hard on honoring the memory of Rebecca Godfrey, both as a character (played by Riley Keough) in the series and as a real human who lived, researched, and wrote about the View Royal case. Shephard and Godfrey worked closely alongside one another while developing the television series, with Shephard even moving to upstate New York to be closer to Godfrey as she battled cancer, allowing for deep collaboration in not only adapting the book, but also a retrospective approach to all of Godfrey’s research materials from two decades prior.

In a 2024 interview with Vulture, Shephard discusses how their relationship developed during this time, and how it allowed her to put more of Godfrey’s private life into the series, as well as create a more rounded retelling of the case. These are essential to what I think the show does extremely well, which is use its characters to further critique of the genre of true crime in ways that the book does not necessarily have the capacity to do.

As I have discussed previously, Under the Bridge uses fictionalized versions of characters from the book in a more rhetorical way to hammer home several subtextual themes running throughout. It also uses a variety of sources to open the series up well beyond the book’s original parameters, especially in its treatment of Reena Virk, but also the details of the case and Godfrey’s own involvement in its reportage. As Godfrey herself acknowledged, the resurgence of true crime’s popularity in the 2010s is part and parcel of her own intent for the book to be more reflexive than the 80s and 90s paperback heyday (or its origins in Victorian crime pamphlets and early Twentieth Century pulp magazines). But the series pushes this farther. I discussed the wholesale invention of the character of Cam Bentland recently, but the insertion of Godfrey herself as a character is a major creative decision with profound impacts on what that reflexivity looks like in the series.

I want to talk about Shephard’s thoughts on Godfrey and on some of the changes made for the Hulu series, borrowing from both the Vulture interview as well as another from Indie Wire, which provide some insight into Shephard’s process of adapting the book as well as highlight some of the ways true crime is thought about as a genre when adapting it to television as a prestige drama.

While it’s true that true crime has long wrestled with its proximity to police officers and other official nodes of the criminal justice system, or plays up the lurid details of the crimes themselves and the personalities of the perpetrators at the expense of highlighting the life of the victims, it has often wrestled with these elements with a blatant disregard for critical analysis in terms of race and gender. The major reckoning of the past decade’s resurgence in popularity has been in terms of the gendered nature of how the genre depicts killers and victims in particular, but race has not been nearly as large a focus.

This likely has to do with the demographics of true crime’s fan base: women are about twice as likely as men to regularly listen to true crime podcasts, for example. But given that the same Pew survey found that a majority of the women who listen to true crime podcasts are Black and Latino, it is interesting that the disparity in the books, shows, films, and podcasts themselves remain focused on white victims, who do not make up a statistical majority of missing and murdered women in the United States.

What is interesting about Under the Bridge is that it not only focuses on a crime perpetrated against a racial minority, but that it also manages to extend its narrative beyond the original source text and provide greater insight into the dynamics of Reena Virk’s family and community in Victoria. This is because Shephard also paid for the rights to adapt a memoir written by Reena’s father, and sought to understand the and portray their experiences as an immigrant family in a smaller part of Canada than audiences are normally exposed to and the role of cultural and religious practice in their newfound community. In addition to far more time spent with Reena and exploring her interactions with her family, which serve to deepen our sympathies with her - something missing in Godfrey’s book no matter how unintentional - we also flashbacks to her father and mother’s experiences with immigration, and their conversion from Hinduism to Jehovah’s Witness. In short, the empathy that comes through from Godfrey’s experiences as a teen when she writes about the teens of View Royal who committed the crime, is afforded to Virk and her family in the series. It’s an overall improvement. By incorporating more of Godfrey’s personal investment into the narrative, the series succeeds in creating profound empathy and self-reflection in ways the book does not, and perhaps cannot.

In the Indie Wire interview, Shephard says that “[Rebecca] gave me her diaries from the ’90s. And she let me read like the most personal entries she had done, every kind of nuance of her heart,” which she says was important in conceptualizing the way the character of Rebecca Godfrey might function differently in narrative terms than the real-life Rebecca. Especially important was the way she gained access to the teens involved after their arrests, and how they came to trust her enough to grant in-depth and sometimes very personal interviews about what they knew, when they knew it, and what they thought about everything that was happening. “She had grown up there [and] was a cool New York writer, party girl,” says Shephard. “There was this vibe where the kids didn’t see her as a journalist or a cop or or somebody to be scared of.”

Structurally, this sets up several dynamics within the series where instead of simply being told the narrative that Godfrey uncovers, such as is the case with the book, which is largely filled with objective reportage. In the series viewers get to see her interactions with the teens, and they learn a little about her past, her guilt over the death of her brother, her emotional turmoil in returning home to conduct research for her novel. This allows viewers to read her own experiences against those of the teenaged characters in ways that create resonance over time. The viewers can see the same mechanisms of the case that drew Godfrey into it in ways that not using Godfrey as a character within the show, or minimizing her involvement until the back end when she was conducting the interviews may not have. Godfrey’s experience of returning home, of being confronted with her past in a way that she hasn’t been, and the power of that experience, are essential for what the series does in terms of focusing the genre in on itself.