Reena's family background, going back two generations, is explored in a dedicated episode, but there is little context given the other young characters; we get bits of information that lead us to understand they're products of parental fecklessness, pop cultural influence or brain chemistry without belaboring the point. That's good, in a way — explicit psychologizing of behavior is a dramatic dead end. But it doesn't add up to much more than the sorry fact that kids, with their developing brains, can make bad decisions, and compound bad decisions with worse decisions, and take actions that aren't the product of any decisions at all.

The performances alone make "Under the Bridge" worth watching. Keough, who resembles Godfrey a little, is a world away from Daisy Jones, held together by her literary project, inhabiting the ghost of the bad kid she once was, or pretends to have been, to gain the teenagers' trust. (She becomes an accomplice, almost.) Gladstone does a lot with a character whose main quality is stolidity; I wish they'd gone a little more into her relationship with Rebecca, but this is a show with a lot on its plate.

And then there are the kids, who are astonishingly good. As Reena, Gupta, heartbreaking in her hopefulness, is especially good. But all the young actors — including Javon Walton as Warren, the odd boy out — are original and human in roles that could easily invite cliche.

Apart from the performances, which alone make the series worth watching, and the overall authenticity of the production, what to make of these eight hours of nearly unrelieved sadness? (The closest the series comes to unalloyed joy, untainted by the knowledge of tragedy to come, is the minute or so in which Rebecca and Cam dance to Siouxsie and the Banshees' cover of Iggy Pop's "The Passenger," though even that will be alloyed soon enough.)

The conventional crime-solving aspects of the drama drive "Under the Bridge" in the earlier episodes, as does Rebecca's prodigal's return plotline. But we wind up mostly with a mess of loss. The characters are too particular on the one hand, and the mean girls trope too familiar on the other, to usefully generalize into a statement about the plight of teenage girls. Though there are many well-written scenes — the performances would not be so impressive if there weren't — over eight episodes, the series, with its shifting attention and skips back and forth in time, loses emotional force; it sustains one's interest, certainly, but less so one's sympathies.

A little light does break in at the end. Justice is served, as the series switches briefly into a courtroom drama — though Rebecca has her doubts about whether it's truly being served. There's a late-series development that indicates a different future for Cam (with a quickly passing nod to Canada's institutional racist history). Rebecca will go on to write her book — she has a contract for it before the series ends — and, sometime after the series ends, sell it to the screen. (A closing title card notes that Godfrey was involved in the series' development before her death in 2022.)

And here we are.

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‘UNDER THE BRIDGE’

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Hulu

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