My Thoughts on FX's The Bridge

I didn't want to watch it. I really didn't. Some writers and Borderland Natives had warned me it was complete garbage but I just had to smell the trash myself. People kept asking me if I'd seen it and what I thought of it and I was tired of saying, "We don't get FX in Juarez." Which is good because I later found out that you can get FX in Juarez, it's just not included in the measly 379 peso cable package that I am able to spring for. Shocker. So I moseyed on over to Amazon Prime to purchase an episode. Because I am alarmingly intelligent and tech-savvy I first purchased episode 7. As someone pointed out on my Facebook page, a 7 does look very similar to a 1 so I'm just going to take that excuse and run with it.

So there I was $4.30 later... not really getting off to a good start, but I was trying to keep an open mind. I'm not really sure where to start. There is so much say. I suppose we can start with all the white cops in cowboy hats with East Texas accents. Someone must have failed to mention to the casting directors that the majority of people in El Paso don't speak with a Southern drawl. Newsflash to anyone who isn't familiar with the city, El Paso is over 80% Hispanic and that lends a hand to the diverse culture and general feel of the city itself, not to mention the accent. It may be in Texas but it's not the Wild West, and I wouldn't confuse the everyday Joe in El Paso with Wyatt Earp. Come on people!

With that being said, you could see why I was a little surprised that everyone on the El Paso side of this show was white. Not just the police officers but the criminals, the medical examiner, the CBP agent... Oh wait, I'm sorry, there was Kitty Conchas. She was Hispanic. She says she was born and raised in El Paso and doesn't speak a word of Spanish. She almost said it like, I was born in El Paso, not Juarez you dip shit. It was as if they are two different worlds instead of what they really are. One. This is when it became abundantly clear to me that the directors and screen play writers and actors really have no clue what life is like here and how connected the communities in El Paso and Juarez are. And give me a break, it would be impossible to work the front desk for EPPD and not speak Spanish. Completely, utterly, impossible. Get your resume together Kitty, it's time to start your job hunt. Maybe there's an opening to waitress at a bistro on the West Side? Cross your fingers.

I don't mean to make this all about race and nationality, but the show was incredibly inaccurate on that front. The police officer in Juarez speaks English at home to his wife and son? Really? At first I thought they did that because people hate reading subtitles but there was plenty of Spanish thrown in the mix throughout the show. I did like how they left words like guey and pinche out of the translations. It felt like an inside joke for the Spanish speaking viewers. Really the only thing that was accurate in this episode was the fact that you can drive right through a major US Point of Entry without CBP checking your trunk. Everything else was just... off.

Not only did they get El Paso wrong, they made Juarenses out to look like assholes. I've never lived in a place that was the setting for a television show, but maybe this is how it always is? Maybe the people of Albuquerque hate Breaking Bad? I'm not sure, but man... this was pretty awful. I was happy to see that Matthew Lillard came out from the rock he's been hiding under since 1998 and happy to see one of the characters question, "why one dead white woman is more important than so many dead just across the bridge," but other than that, I just couldn't get past the inaccuracies. It felt like the longest 65 minutes of my life and I checked the clock on multiple occasions wishing time would go by faster.

In the end I was just left thinking, how in the hell can you tell a person is Hispanic by just seeing their legs and do you think Amazon will give me a refund for episode 7?