I’m not the only person who has problems with “The Bridge.” This guy goes into some greater length about the background to the series, and its problems, then viciously dissects a particularly egregious example that prompted me to start writing the post below. It turns out that “The Bridge” can be seen as less a TV drama and more as a rhetorical exercise by a particularly notorious figure in Canadian policing history — background I was wholly unaware of when I wrote my own review. So when I wondered whether “the producers [had] created this world through inattention and laziness — that it came about by accident, rather than because they wanted a framework to explore complex issues,” it turns out that my charitable explanation of laziness and stupidity was exactly that — charitable — and that the venality of the whole show is probably deliberate.
As one of the linked posts puts it:
But I’m quite confident in saying there’s barely anything in “The Bridge” that ever really happened — except to some guy with his own private movie playing in his head.
The entire series operates on a level of paranoia and self-delusion that beggars belief. Leo and his fellow officers are downtrodden and abused by all those of higher rank. Every Captain and Deputy Chief practically sneers with venality while twisting their Snidely Whiplash moustaches — and those are just the women!
Do read the whole thing; it made me feel much better. One should not get into the habit of changing a review based on information received after the fact, but this is particularly bad, so F– is now the new score for “The Bridge.”