4 out of 5

Created by: Susannah Grant, Ayelet Waldman, and Michael Chabon

Marie has been sexually assaulted.  She’s currently staying in a home as part of a social services program, and the counselors are there, and a former foster parent is there, as the police dutifully circle and ask their questions.  Marie, as played by Kaitlyn Dever, masks many outward emotional signs of being affected, but we see the flashes of the incident from her memories.  Director Lisa Cholodenko (alongside directors Michael Dinner and Susannah Grant in later episodes) is careful not to dress up these memories as horror movies, or to over-stylize them, but gives us glimpses of what occurred from Marie’s point of view, through the visibility offered by the blindfold that was forced on her.  She retells what occurred to a police officer, and is then made to repeat it several times as he makes he has his facts straight.  The detectives come in… and she repeats the story again.  At the hospital, put through a rape screening, she must retell it again.  And then as the same detectives begin their questioning in earnest, again.  And again.

The flashes keep coming, and some details in her telling become slippery.  The slightest suggestion from a foster parent of Marie’s tendency toward exaggeration casts a new light on things for the detectives, and they have Marie run through things another time.  Only this time they’re keyed on those discrepancies: why this?  And why that?  There are the flashes; there’s Marie’s outward calm.  And then there’s her decision to be done with it, and state that, sure, she made it all up.

All the support around her drips away.  She had to explain the story again and again, and now she has to explain why she ‘lied,’ again and again.  Friends turn; former foster parents are hesitant to be associated with her; her privileges at her housing are locked down.  The distractions pile up and weigh on her job, and despite some people wanting to ‘be there for her,’ Marie is all alone.

Elsewhere, a few years later, Detective Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever), is investigating a sexual assault with details very similar to what happened to Marie.  There’s a clear divide with how she treats her victim, and stays with her through all of the followup to offer the same type of personalized attention.  There are no clues as to the attacker’s identity; the case stays with her.  She’s eventually able to connect it with a similar case being handled by Detective Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette), after some butting of heads as Duvall has to show Rasmussen that she knows what she’s doing, the two team up and dive in, connecting their case to several others across districts, and coming up with clues that suggest a member of law enforcement may be involved…

The bulk of Unbelievable is procedural, and it’s nearly pitch perfect: we’re taken through, and given the clear impression of, the hefty step-by-step, thankless research that has to go in just to eliminate dead ends, or to come up with the most meager of leads.  That none of these leads, by themselves, are “it,” but must be followed until you’re eventually led to something that’s more than a lead.  Duvall and Rasmussen but their hearts (and much time) into aspects of the case that have no pay off, and then there’s all the careful politicking to be done when their suspect might be law.  We see them both at home, Duvall with her police husband, Rasmussen married to a D.A., and we see how they make this work; how they function in the trenches while still being human.  Unbelievable is not about so many of the normal tropes of this sort of thing, of showing personal lives crumbling, or of cat-and-mouse-ing with suspects.  Occasional check-ins with Marie perpetuate further social indignations upon her, but Unbelievable isn’t wallowing in tragedy, either: as it’s a procedural, it’s procedurally following on events in Marie’s life.  And to the show’s utmost credit, while it has three female leads and is obviously a story centered around horrid crimes against women by a man, it doesn’t go out of its way to frame an agenda around this, which makes the issues at hand all the more impactful.  The facts are damning and horrible enough.

There are, unfortunately, some things the show can’t get in to, by choosing to take this perspective.  There’s an interesting question of perception that arises: the foster mother who initially questions Marie’s story does so because she hints at having been through the same in her past, and Marie doesn’t act ‘like it’s happened to her.’  There’s how the initial detectives’ point of view on the case is so easily shifted by this one dissenting opinion.  And then there’s Marie’s mental state, having led to her changing her story; while Dever does an excellent job at portraying the kind of muted outward personality that we can imagine mapped to her behaviors, the many causes and effects of what brings her to agree to having lied can’t effectively be baked in to one episode, and by being careful to not over-sensationalize the event, the writers / directors can’t play the change up too much either.  Our episodic check-ins thus have to shoe-horn in interactions with her house mates or other former foster parents to sort of retroactively explain it, but it’s an emotional component that doesn’t quite get to land until late in the series.  And as for the other aspects mentioned, they’re wholly too complex to not deserve their own series, it’s just unfortunate that they’re tossed out as food for thought but then not much returned to.

I have no “fixes” for these.  I think the focus of the show was for the best, and with that, I can’t figure a good way to arrange these other elements around it.  It makes the swing between episode 1 and the rest a little severe, and maybe puts us in a bit more of an accessibly “safe” state for watching the rest of the series, once it kicks in to detective mode, which may or may not be ideal.

But on the whole, I do wish other shows had Unbelievable’s faith in just sticking to the material.  While this may contradict my questioning of straying from some deeper questioning, the trade-off is that the show doesn’t pass on a “this is how you should feel” message, and lets us exist with the great performances of its leads and balanced writing and direction, and remains gripping and compelling throughout as a result.