Under the Bridge EPs Knew It Wouldn't Hurt Their Show to Reveal the Killer Midseason

Quinn Shephard and Samir Mehta have been working on the Hulu series Under the Bridge for years. Shephard developed the series with Rebecca Godfrey, who wrote the book of the same name. Godfrey passed away in October 2022 right before production on the series began. Mehta was the showrunner and ran the writers’ room. They both were executive producers and writers on the show. “The jobs we had on this show are typically one person,” Shephard laughs. “And we kind of had to merge into one person in order to do this.”

“This was an all-consuming two to three years of production,” Mehta says. “Quinn has been developing it for five years. I think both of us are eager to see what opportunities come next after the show, but I think creatively I need a minute to digest and allow my own thoughts to return to me that are not about Under the Bridge.”
 
The eight-episode series, which is now streaming in its entirety on Hulu, follows the tragic story of Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) who in 1997 was attacked and murdered by a group of teens including Kelly (Izzy G), Josephine (Chloe Guidry), Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow) and Warren (Javon “Wanna” Walton). In Wednesday’s series finale, “Mercy Alone,” written by Mehta, the details of that horrific night are revealed, Kelly is on trial for murder while Reena’s parents Manjit (Ezra Faroque Khan) and Suman (Archie Panjabi) wrestle with their grief, Rebecca (Riley Keough) writes her book and comes to terms with the questionable choices she has made, and Cam (Lily Gladstone) quits the police force.

Primetimer spoke with Shephard and Mehta about their adaptation of Godfrey’s book, how they kept it from being a stereotypical true-crime series, and if they will ever revisit these characters. [Spoilers ahead.]

Let’s start with the final shot of the series. Reena’s parents are sitting on Reena’s bed in her bedroom listening to the music Reena loved [The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Kick In the Door”] while we see Reena’s reflection in the mirror. After all the courtroom drama in the finale, this is a quiet, contemplative ending. 

Mehta: We knew we needed to end the show with Reena. Ultimately this is her story. More so than the theatrics of the crime and the courtroom scenes, it really is about this family and the loss. The real tragedy of it is that these parents have to continue living their lives with this loss forever. It’s not really ever going to go away. 

To make it even worse, it is that feeling of, “Oh I wish I had connected a little bit more while I had the time.” [We wanted] to do it in a way that had some poignancy to it without being just so over the top, to find that subtly. No matter what, it’s going to be horribly sad but to do it with a level of elegance was something that Quinn and I had a lot of conversations about, to really land on exactly how it would be displayed.

Shephard: The title of the pilot is “Looking Glass," which is the meaning of Reena’s name, and then sort of seeing her through the looking glass but not standing beside [her parents] in real life was our visual way to represent everything that Samir is describing.

And there’s no dialogue between her parents. 
 
Mehta: This actually happened quite a lot in the series but especially in this last scene — where we would write a big scene there would be a lot of dialogue, a lot of the emotional turns would be played out through the actors speaking to each other. And little by little, we would strip away the words until there was basically nothing and that’s what happened here. I don’t think they say a word to each other. It’s all in the eyes and the feeling.

The series gives viewers a lot of context and insight into why Warren, Josephine and Dusty behaved the way they did. But viewers don’t really get that with Kelly.

Shephard: So much of the show is a plea for empathy. But I think when it comes to the real life Kelly Ellard, her lack of demonstrating any sort of remorse or growth publically and our inability, in our very extensive research, to find literally any signs of regret or remorse from her, I think felt like that is where we had to draw the line. With every single other character involved, you're able to hold both realities of the crime being something unforgivably brutal and also finding pieces of humanity and empathy in the kids that were involved because of their circumstances.

With Kelly, we talked a lot about what you do with psychopathy in reality and the black hole of evil that certain people seem to contain.  I think that we didn’t necessarily want to villainize her any further than she has villainized herself publicly. It felt like if there was going to be one character who we could sort of use as an example of somebody that didn’t deserve our full empathy it would be her. I feel wrong saying that about anyone no matter how bad they are. Her total lack of reconciliation is a big problem.
 
Mehta: I think if you challenged us to do the Kelly Ellard story and really wanted us to humanize her we could probably do it. But at a certain point, we wanted to draw a line. The question became: Why are we [putting in] more effort than she ever did? We don’t want to make this declaration that some people are just born bad and that’s the end of it. If the show is supposed to be one that inspires more empathy, I don’t think we can then decide to stop at a certain point. But there are little nods to explaining Kelly. They’re very subtle. 

There’s the scene in the finale where Kelly is on the phone with Josephine and says, among many violent comments, that they should go dig a hole and bury Reena alive and her mom doesn’t even react. 

Mehta: Her mom is in the room, out of focus, in the background. That is supposed to visually represent a parent who isn’t really intervening, who isn’t actually trying to model good behavior. There’s little pieces like that. You hear Rebecca say the line “Sometimes it’s just pain buried deep within” [over] the final shot on Kelly, which again is supposed to indicate there’s maybe something deeply wrong with Kelly that if we took the time to examine and process maybe [we] could figure it out. But it is buried so deep that maybe an entire lifetime isn’t enough. 

This is a very well-known crime in Canada. Talk a little about how you kept the show from being a typical true-crime series. 

Mehta: Sometimes we would literally have the conversation of what would a true-crime series do? Let’s call it out. That's the list of stuff that we are not going to do. In the Episode 2 cliffhanger, Josephine has spent the episode taking credit for Reena’s death and then she’s shocked to find out she’s dead which obviously means she didn’t kill her. 

That isn’t a twist that’s there to give you this whodunit feeling in the traditional sense. That’s there because that’s Josephine's character. The twist is built around her psychology. Then quite deliberately we tell you the answer to whodunit three episodes in, with five left, to very quickly communicate to the audience, this isn’t going to be what you thought. We are very intentionally subverting the tropes of this genre.

Shephard: I think everybody came in with the same gut instinct that this was a character story. This was not a crime story. No red herrings and no visual violence on screen were the two things that were leading us. You should be able to feel as if you watched the violence emotionally through watching characters. We should not have to show this girl’s body being brutalized on screen for people to feel the effect of it.

Obviously people could easily google who killed Reena Virk, but it’s still a very different choice to reveal the killer with more than half of the series to go.

Mehta: In my opinion, it’s a crutch to build an entire show around who did the murder. It is fairly surface. It is just a simple puzzle of withholding and revealing. There’s not much to it and I think, as writers, it's just much more satisfying for us to go deeper. This is going to be an odd comparison but I’ve heard stand-up comedians write their hour and then take their last joke and make it the first joke and throw out everything because they want to build to the best moment and start there. I think that’s a scary way to write but it makes for better storytelling.

The finale is very court scene-heavy, how much of that was from the actual court transcript?

Shepard: All of the court scenes are based on real-life transcripts with the kids. It is a combination of the police interrogation, the court transcripts and then Warren confessed the crime to Rebecca first. We kept going back and forth on which way he should do it in the show. If he should confess it in court or confess it to Rebecca privately. But we used his transcript of that confession as part of his testimony. So, all of the testimony of the kids of the series are almost word for word things that they really did say down to Kelly's British accent and her screaming, “I did not cross the bridge!” We did take things from multiple trials of hers and kind of mix and match them.

Quinn, you were friends with Rebecca and spent quite a bit of time with her before she passed away right before the filming for the series started. 

Shepard: It’s incredibly complicated when you develop a lot of closeness with the real person that you’re also portraying in the show. I think that I was very lucky that Rebecca herself understood pretty early on that her character was going to be incredibly dynamic but also incredibly flawed in the show. I think that a lot of that was stemming from pretty honest discussions that we had about her real life choices and involvement and the conflicts that she had. 

Rebecca herself taught an antiheroine course at Columbia. I think that she was a proponent of women’s storylines in books, films, and TV shows not needing to be centered around being likable and being lovable but to actually be centered around their complexity. She was just down for the fact that is how she would ultimately be portrayed. It’s very conflicting because I would oftentimes feel a lot of sympathy or understanding for why she did a certain thing but I would also feel really critical of it. 

It is a constant challenge that we had to talk through kind of at every stage. Samir and I would unpack each piece of her arc and kind of ask ourselves all those hard questions. Is this true to who she really was? Is this something she would have been okay with? Is this something that we need to, as responsible storytellers, address? And we just did our best.

In addition to Rebecca’s book, you also optioned the book, Reena’s dad, Manjit Virk, wrote. 

Mehta: A lot of Reena’s homelife is not quite present in Under the Bridge, the book. So a lot of the flashback storyline was taken from Manjit’s book. Episode 4, which is so much about his own immigration story and falling in love with Suman — that’s all from his book and some of it just was from our personal conversations with him just asking for little anecdote here and there.

Sometimes it would just be detail: What was it like with Smooch [Reena’s bird] in the house? Little things like that to give us the texture of the Virk household. That was something that was very important for us to portray in the show but it’s something that’s the least covered in the press because so much of that was just focusing on the murder.  

And Cam is the only entirely fictional character in the series.

Shepard: The idea for Cam came really early on for me. There are a lot of real anecdotes we compiled into her character. Once Rebecca was a meaningful perspective in the show, the show needed to have a foil of someone who was equally invested in the crime from a personal place but who landed in a very different opinion than she did and who connected with a very different part of the story than she did. 

The fictional aspects were a way for us to make the crime and the unpacking of trauma that kind of goes on in the show as personal as possible for our adult lead characters. We definitely did not want to make copaganda, so having a character whose journey is actually about realizing the complicit quality of the police system in acts of violence is part of why we wanted to make it.

The post-script reveals what happened to the characters in real life. Would you ever want to do another series telling more of Warren’s story, how he forged a relationship with Reena’s parents, or Kelly, who had multiple trials and a long, drawn-out legal battle?

Mehta: I highly doubt it. I don’t even think either of us would do true crime again.

Shephard: I think Reena’s story and the story of the trial and the kids involved in it ends here for sure for us. I’d be down for Cam on the loose.

Mehta: We would watch Cam go solve more crimes. 

Doesn’t Cam quit the police force in the finale?

Mehta: She could be Cam Bentland, Bounty Hunter going rogue.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Under the Bridge is streaming on Hulu. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Amy Amatangelo is a writer and editor. In addition to Primetimer, her work can be found in Paste Magazine, Emmy Magazine and the LA Times. She also is the Treasurer of the Television Critics Association.