BORDER DUO: Demian Bichir and Diane Kruger in “The Bridge” Inset: Clemence Posey and Stephen Dillane in “The Tunnel,” an adaptation. (
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The story that unfolds on FX’s “The Bridge” seems so well-suited to the US-Mexican border that it’s hard to imagine it being told anywhere else.
In reality, that story is also being told in four other countries; Denmark, Sweden, England and France.
“The Bridge” was first set on the Swedish-Danish border, a dividing line that to Americans means little. But to Scandinavians, that divide provides dramatic conflict.
“That’s one of the perceptions about Scandinavia that’s wrong,” says Lars Blomgren, managing director of Filmlance, the company that produced “The Bridge,” titled “Bron” in Sweden and “Broen” in Denmark. “Scandinavia consists of Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway. Denmark and Finland were both crushed by the Russians in World War II, while the Swedes haven’t been to war in 200 years. The Swedes are considered to be more white collar and logical, while the Danes are tradesmen and more hot-blooded.”
Filmlance was tired of seeing most of Sweden’s prime-time programming come from Danish producers. The company wanted original content that could play both in Sweden and Denmark. Blomgren and his team reached out to writers, and two of them, Hans Rosenfeldt and Björn Stein, pitched the idea that became “Bron.”
“It was obvious that this could be a format,” says Blomgren. “We started talking about it quite early.”
In fact, Shine America, which owns Filmlance, first planned to produce “The Bridge” for US audiences as a story set in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
“We really thought that was more of a direct correlation to the Scandinavian version. It would have the same challenging weather conditions, and the same winter light,” says Carolyn Bernstein, executive vice president of Shine America.
Moreover, while “The Bridge” tells the story of a corpse found on a bridge that consists of a top half from one country and the bottom half from the other, the story also concerns the evolving relationship between the two cops on the case.
That said, when executive producer Elwood Reid developed “The Bridge with Meredith Stiehm (“Homeland”) for Americans, the pair lobbied to move the show’s setting to the Southwest border, after rejecting one idea to have it at Niagara Falls.
“Meredith and Elwood said, ‘We know how to do one season on the Northern border, but we don’t know how to do five or seven. Whereas, if we move it to the US-Mexican border, we’ll have more ripped-from-the-headlines stories than we could otherwise hope to portray,’” says Bernstein. “It became clear that was the bolder, more courageous approach. And for an American audience, the border is on the front page of the paper at least every week.”
Stiehm and Reid also found support from FX, which bought the show and had been looking for a way to tell stories from that region.
“[FX CEO John] Langraf said, ‘If you do this right, the border issues will seep into the show,” Reid says. “You can slowly bring these characters into the deep end.’”
And that’s largely what happened, as the central characters — El Paso Police Detective Sonya Cross (Diane Kruger) and Juarez Police Detective Marco Ruiz (Demian Bichir) — have delved more deeply into the murder that first brought them together, and the bodies that have since turned up.
Cross is a petite blond who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, so while she does have an emotional life she has a very difficult time expressing it..
“The one thing that all cops need to be good at is reading people’s faces, and autistic people don’t know how to read emotion,” says Reid
Meanwhile, Bichir plays Ruiz as a warm man who’s empathetic to Cross, even though her lack of social skills regularly gets him into trouble.
“Sonya and Marco need to have chemistry and that’s part of the push-pull of the show,” says Reid.
The American version of “The Bridge” has been sold to networks in more than 120 countries. As the show wraps up its first season, Season 2 of “Bron/Broen” is ready to bow overseas. Later this year, “The Tunnel,” which takes place in England and France, will debut on Sky TV. The plot kicks off when the body of a French politician is found in the Chunnel between those countries.
The series stars Stephen Dillane (“John Adams”) and French actress Clemence Poesy as detectives Karl Roebuck and Elise Wassermann who investigate the murder on behalf of their respective nations.
More localized formats of “The Bridge” are on the horizon, but first Blomgren wants to get these three versions up and running.
“I’ve had offers from so many countries,” he says. “But right now we just had to stop because it’s complicated enough. For example, we were talking about North and South Korea and I’m almost certain that we will have Russia and Ukraine. I’m starting to look at it like ‘Hamlet.’”