Adapting Rebecca Godfrey

As I continue reading Under the Bridge, I’m working through a lot of interviews and summaries of things that came out around its release about both the adaptive process and about the author, Rebecca Godfrey, whose involvement in the case itself is a major part of the book and the TV series. I think the topic of Godfrey and the process of adaptation is going to take up a significant portion of my writing on the show as I start work on that chapter of the book. In my last entry I highlighted how she was articulating her book’s place in the post-Serial true crime landscape, so today I’m going to stick to that broader topic, but shift focus just a bit. There are a couple of interviews in Esquire and Vulture from May 2024 which shed some light on this process that I want to talk about briefly.

The show’s co-producer, Quinn Shephard, approached Godfrey in 2019 about developing her book for television, and wrote a pitch for FX in 2020. She worked closely with Godfrey adapting the series for television, and as such, some of the creative decisions seem odd at first glance. For example, Riley Keough’s depiction of Godfrey is fictionalized, not just in her friendship and romance with the officer working the case played by Lily Gladstone, but in ways that don’t fully line up with the timeline of the case. In the series and the book, Godfrey returns home to Victoria to conduct research for her novel, which is partially based on her time as a troubled teen dealing with her brother’s untimely death. As a narrative dynamic, it sets up the juxtaposition that shows up in the book when Godfrey inserts herself, which is that she is similarly troubled, with demons from her teenage years and similarly stultified in her hometown. In the show, as in the book, this allows her to demonstrate a remarkable amount of empathetic understanding, as the teens also see something of themselves in her, just as she does them. A version of the other through the looking glass; a warped possibility of what life could’ve been.

Significantly, it is Godfrey’s ability to gain the teenagers’ trust that ends up providing much of the details for how the murder of Reena Virk played out. The interviews she was able to conduct revealed all kinds of information that not only shaped the trajectory of the case’s investigation and prosecution, but also the stark, unblinking nature of her prose in its retelling of those events. This, of course, forms the meat of the adaptation, which uses Godfrey’s involvement to comment on the nature of the true crime genre itself, at least to a certain degree of success.

This is something that Shephard says drew her to the book in the first place. She tells Esquire:

“I thought it was so fascinating she had grown up in the same town as the kids and that she had such an interest in writing fiction about the criminal-justice system, juvie centers for kids, and young teens growing up in Victoria,” Shephard said. “Then she kind of stumbled into this story that was like a real-life version of the fiction she was writing. I just thought it was very cinematic. I thought, Oh, here’s a way to comment on the perspective of true crime.”

The inner workings of the adaptive process are key to my focus, I think. I really want to understand how the prestige drama format functions relative to true crime, and I think some of it is a claim to reflexivity. This was apparent in the interview with Godfrey that I highlighted yesterday, at least as her own understanding of how the genre has shifted since the mid-2000s into a more respectable, reflective space. But I question how that works outside of fictionalized texts where this is made such an explicit point in the text itself, such as it is in Under the Bridge. Even the fabrication of Lily Gladstone’s Cam (the police officer character in the show) out of whole cloth as a way of exploring the Canadian justice system’s treatment of First Nations citizens through juxtaposition of her experiences as an investigator with those of Warren Glowatsky (Warren G) as a suspect. I haven’t done too much thinking through of the Cam/Warren thing, but it’s certainly a major point of difference in the show from the book, and one that I can’t imagine is random. Maybe I can dig around and find Shephard talking about that change somewhere. Something I’ll have to come back to. For now, I’m focused on Godfrey a little longer.

Much of the scholarship on true crime in the 21st Century points to its self-reflexive nature, and it’s true that there are elements of critique baked into many of the most-discussed and most popular texts. Season one of Serial is, for example, in the same vein as some of the best work in true crime - In Cold Blood, The Stranger Beside Me, and, in my opinion, Under the Bridge - where its host Sarah Koenig becomes involved in the process of trying to figure out what happened in the murder of Hae Min Lee to the point that she starts questioning how much she actually understands versus how much she wishes things were the way she wants them to be in believing that Lee’s convicted killer Adnan Syed might be innocent. But as many have pointed out, this self-reflexive questioning still comes at the expense of the genre’s worst impulses, thus replicating the things they claim to be critical of: the detailed focus on the grisly details of the case, a privileging of the police’s position or, in the case of each of the texts I listed above, an overly sympathetic portrait of the perpetrator(s) in service of a compelling narrative at the expense of focusing on their victims.

I find this fascinating in terms of adapting the genre to the prestige drama so prevalent across television and streaming services in the 2010s and 2020s, with its focus on star casting, cinematic style, and aspirations toward “elevated” content that can somehow be divorced from its lowbrow source, or, in the case of true crime, an entire genre that is historically associated with low culture and base human interests in prurient and even taboo subject matter.

In 2020, Shephard actually moved to upstate New York to be closer to Godfrey, who was undergoing treatment for an aggressive cancer to which she would succumb in October 2022. According to Shephard, Godfrey really shared a lot of material from her time working on the book, including original interviews, the police file, and other things which became very important for the adaptation in the wake of Godfrey’s death. While much of the show was written beforehand, Shephard had to complete the scripts and actually produce the show without Godfrey’s presence. So, while Shephard and Godfrey were close friends, and Godfrey was heavily involved in the adaptive process, it’s important to remember that her absence during the prodution itself is the true context within which we need to understand the show. More on that tomorrow. And maybe I’ll actually get around to talking about the much longer interview in Vulture, which is a treasure trove for where my mind is currently.