Writer Rebecca Godfrey is trying to persuade the family of teenager Reena Virk to speak with her for a book shes working on.

I figured I could give people the opportunity to know who she was, Rebecca (Riley Keough) tells Reenas uncle, Raj (Anoop Desai), in the third episode of Under the Bridge, after a memorial service for his niece. If you talk to me, then maybe I can get some truth out there.

At various points in the eight-episode true crime series, Rebecca continues to insist her book intends to show Reena as who she was, not just how she died. But by the end, its clear that Rebecca doesnt know much about Reena. Whats worse the show doesnt give the audience enough to know about her either.

Hulus Under the Bridge, which adapts the nonfiction book of the same name that real-life author Rebecca Godfrey released in 2005, valiantly attempts to reshape the true crime mold. In the fall of 1997, Reena was murdered in Saanich, British Columbia, by a group of teenagers who had viciously bullied her. Her death attracted national attention in Canada.

Through flashbacks and parallel timelines, Under the Bridge tries to paint a fuller portrait of who Reena was before her gruesome death. Adapted by Quinn Shephard, with TV veterans Liz Tigelaar (Little Fires Everywhere) and Samir Mehta (Fear the Walking Dead) among its executive producers, the series succeeds at untangling some of the many complex social dynamics surrounding the case, approaching the story as more of a sociological study and less of a whodunit. (Godfrey, who died just weeks before the series went into production in 2022 , was involved in its development as an executive producer.)

But it doesnt quite break the true crime mold entirely, still falling into some of the usual tropes of the genre. The series attempts at giving dimensionality to Reena (Vritika Gupta), her family and other key characters particularly people of color dont go deep enough. Much of it, especially the shows latter half, still ends up being about the details of Reenas death and the stories of her horrific attackers.