Shot by Jeff Muhlstock with a perpetual ’80s glow and designed to accentuate every feathered hairdo and every tacky interior design choice, then smothered in a one-hit-after-another soundtrack, Bridge and Tunnel has some of the same backward-looking sentimentality and the kind of camera-friendly young cast that helped turn Netflix’s Outer Banks into one of the surprise hits of last spring. Jill and Jimmy have been a couple on-and-off since junior high, while Stacey and Mikey have been hooking up nearly as long. and they’re all hung up on relationships from their past. They all have their eyes on the future - Jimmy as a National Geographic photographer, Jill as a fashion designer, Pags as an attorney, etc. This is the story of longtime chums Jimmy (Sam Vartholomeos), Jill (Caitlin Stasey), Tammy (Gigi Zumbado), Mikey (Jan Luis Castellanos), Pags (Brian Muller) and Stacey (Isabella Farrell), reunited for one last summer of fun after their college graduations. Somewhere in the six half-hour episodes here there’s an 85-minute feature waiting to get chiseled out, excavating the story’s low-key pleasures from a whole lot of padding. Unlike his last series, TNT’s short-lived Public Morals, Bridge and Tunnel is comfortably within his aesthetic wheelhouse, a nostalgia-bathed coming-of-age dramedy set in Long Island circa 1980. Some of that sense of scale goes missing in Epix’s Bridge and Tunnel, Burns’ latest attempt to conquer the small screen. You might not have heard of all of them, but they exist, they play festivals and I’m sure they have fans. Somebody receiving a comparable level of festival hype today would have jumped immediately to a Marvel spinoff and vanished in grandiosity, but Burns has steadily continued to make small, character-driven ensemble pieces with brisk running times.
One of the most admirable things about Edward Burns’ career since the writer-director-star’s 1995 Sundance breakout The Brothers McMullen is how well he has maintained his sense of scale.
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