Edward Burns' Epix drama Bridge and Tunnel is a likeable movie in the form of a padded TV series

The Hollywood Reporter

"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," says Daniel Fienberg. "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. You might not have heard of all of them, but they exist, they play festivals and I'm sure they have fans. Some of that sense of scale goes missing in Epix's Bridge and Tunnel, Burns' latest attempt to conquer the small screen. 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. 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."

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• Bridge and Tunnel is a weightless and occasionally airless trip down memory lane
• Edward Burns says his tonal model for Bridge and Tunnel were he early Beatles hits that “put a smile on your face without being cornball-ish...We do need that now"