Aaron Douglas, courtesy CBS
THE BRIDGE
Friendly Rating: Older elementary and up.
Safety Rating: Some violence, but pretty bloodless.
Quality Rating: Too obscure for its own good.
New series premieres on CBS tonight at 8 p.m.
A lot of times, when I look at new series, I don’t like to read the show description until after I’ve seen the pilot. I basically want to know how well the show explains itself. So, when I’m over halfway into The Bridge and I’m still trying to figure the show out, that’s not a good sign.
Safety-wise, it is a cop show, so it is about the violence we do unto others, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t see one gun actually fired during the premiere. Plenty were drawn, but no shots. The one scene where a homeless person is run over by a truck, you see the truck approaching, but then you cut away to a neighbor on her lawn and hear the impact, but don’t actually see it.
The show is supposed to be about cop Frank Leo (Aaron Douglas), a big city cop who works out of The Bridge division, where an actual bridge over a river separates the wealthy suburbanites from the poor. Leo gets a little over-heated when his friend commits suicide and demands that the officer be given a full police funeral and gets his fellow officers to go along against the brass and give the dead officer the funeral anyway. And when two other officers get caught using force on a kid who later dies – and are videotaped doing it, Leo steps up and finds himself the union rep.
Except this is a department where all kinds of nastiness is going on at the top levels, what with a secret group investigating cops for wrongdoing that they aren’t committing and another street cop robbing drug dealers. In fact, there are so many threads running in the first half of the show, it’s impossible to tell what the show’s about. And, sadly, it’s not interesting enough to hold your attention until you do figure it out. It’s a pilot trying to do too much and not doing anything satisfactorily.
But then, there’s not much else on Saturday nights, so if you’re not out and about or having family game night, it might be okay. If you can stay awake through it.
