Unbelievable --- Season I Review: The Victim Gets Nothing

I decided to watch Netflix’s Unbelievable as a result of numerous recommendations made to me by family and friends who had watched it and knew my penchant for crime television. Just to be clear, the show tells the story of two rape investigations, in different communities, that are handled in very different manners. To a person, all said it's one of the better shows they have seen in a while. Accordingly, as I sat down to watch it, I had some seriously high expectations. However, initially, I was sourly disappointed.

The series starts like countless crime dramas we have seen before. There is a crime. There is an investigation. There are strange, disparate elements that will eventually come together at the end. The only exceptional element of the program that I saw was the acting of Kaitlyn Dever, who portrays protagonist Marie Adler, whom many will probably remember as Loretta McCeady in FX's Justified. She seemed to emote the confusion, chaos, and complexity you would expect bedeviling a young rape victim. However, about halfway through the first episode, I paused it, and thought that I should just put it in my queue and watch the rest some other time ... maybe. However, since there were only fifteen minutes left, I decided to watch the rest of that first episode.

That is when my mind about the show changed. During those last minutes, the show makes a subtle but important change. Rather than seeing the show from the police, prosecutor, or witnesses’ perspectives, it begins to center in on Dever’s perspective as the victim. It is a weird but interesting perspective in that you would think that, as the victim, she might have some control over her expression of what happened. But the reality is, she had little control over anything. Instead, what happens next is a conflict of reactions from friends, family, counselors, police and everyone else, but the victim. It’s a great switch that makes you want to watch further because you want to see how Dever’s character is going to hold up. That is, the story switched from wanting to know “whodunit” to wanting to know how will Marie survive the intense pressure of her circumstances.

But then, in another twist, the second episode switches gears once again. The scene is several years later, in a location hundreds of miles away from where we were in the first episode. Another rape has occurred, and another police officer is investigating it. Unlike, the rape in the first episode, the detectives in this case are women, namely Detectives Karen Duvall (Merritt Walker) and Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette). So you begin thinking, “a-ha” there is some connection. However, just as in the first episode, the “whodunit” quickly becomes background to the more important story of how the case is being investigated. The focus of this second story is not the victim, but rather the detectives investigating the case. While this perspective is not new, the way it is portrayed, in comparison to the detectives who investigated the case in the first episode is unique.

The remainder of the series plays the two main stories off one another. On the one hand, there is the continuing story of how Marie is dealing with the fallout of her rape. On the other hand, the viewer delves into the mindset of the police investigating a similar crime, that may be linked to the first. However, whereas the police in the first crime were falling over themselves to resolve it as quickly as possible, the detectives in the second crime are cautious and methodical to a fault. The results of both investigations are quite different, as is the effect that each investigation has on the victim and the police involved. This is what makes Unbelievable so good. It is less of a police story than a psychological comment on victims of crime and the police who investigate those crime. For television, this is truly heady stuff.

What do you think? Have you seen Unbelievable?