Under the Bridge & The New True Crime

Once I start my writing days in a week or so, the first thing I’m going to tackle is the intro to the book project. In the meantime, I am deep in reading and watching for the true crime chapter. Or chapters. It may be larger; we’ll see. One of the focal points is how the true crime boom collides with the prestige drama formula as streaming platforms like Hulu and Max and others are competing for an audience that has largely abandoned linear cable. There are a lot of texts that line up with this that I’ll be tackling to a certain extent, but I’m probably most excited about digging into Under the Bridge (2024), Hulu’s adaptation of the true crime novel of the same name, written by Rebecca Godfrey and published in 2005. The book and the limited series detail the murder of Reena Virk, a 14 year-old Canadian girl murdered in 1997 by a group of teenagers. The adaptation stars Riley Keough as Godfrey, who became personally involved in some aspects of the investigation by interviewing all parties involved in the immediate aftermath of the teens’ arrests (changed and further fictionalized in the series) and Lily Gladstone as Cam, an officer investigating Virk’s disappearance and murder, who is fabricated for the show (and is a conglomerate of several characters, as is typical of adapted material, and other elements which are invented for narrative purposes). More on the adaptation itself at a later date. Today I just wanted to highlight something I’ve found interesting from my cursory research into the book and the show.

In a brief 2019 conversation in Interview magazine, Godfrey was asked about the surge of interest in true crime since 2015 or so when it re-entered mainstream culture in a major way following the successes of the podcast Serial (2014-present), the HBO series The Jinx (2015; 2024), and the Netflix series Making a Murderer (2015; 2018). Talking about how Truman Capote’s pathbreaking work In Cold Blood (1966) influenced her approach to using the crime to investigate a community of people and the individual tensions within it, she recalls that, at the time her book was published, true crime was not held in high regard. “There was this distaste for them, and I remember when I would tell people at dinner parties what I was working on, they would wince and not want to hear about it,” she says. But that has changed. She continues, delineating how the genre seems to have shifted since its previous heyday in the 1980s, when Ann Rule and Carlton Stowers were major figureheads of true crime novels: “A lot of these [new] series are using a crime as a method to explore larger emotional or social issues, and I don’t think that had been done before." Certainly, in the case of Ann Rule’s work, the only thing that approaches it is her first success, The Stranger Beside Me (1980), which primarily explored the tension in her personal friendship of Ted Bundy, which predated his crimes and extended well beyond the time at which she - as a seasoned true crime reporter - should have been able to fully acknowledge the reality of her “friend”’s crimes.

I’ll write some more later about the book and its adaptation, which will be one of the major case studies, but I think it’s interesting that this delineation is apparent to Godfrey in 2019, and that it marks a shift in focus and purpose to her. This is reflected again and again in work on the genre, including in my friend Tanya Horeck’s excellent book Justice on Demand (2019), which explores the many ways digital streaming video platforms and social media have impacted the circulation and reception of true crime. I’ll share some thoughts about that book soon, but for now if you’re interested in academic literature on true crime, it’s a must-read.

There is a treasure trove out there where Godfrey is asked about the genre and some about the show, as she was working on the series herself until her untimely death in 2022 at the age of 54, following a lengthy battle with cancer. Over the next week or so I’ll probably focus on some of these interviews and offer some thoughts about the book and the series as I read the book for the first time and rewatch the series. I have no idea what I’ll talk about, but it might lead to some useful material, which is why I’m doing this blogging exercise in the first place.