The Atlantic

<em>Unbelievable </em>Is TV’s Most Humane Show

The Netflix series is a remarkable study of how sexual-assault investigations should be conducted, and how they shouldn’t.
Source: Beth Dubber / Netflix

This article contains spoilers through all eight episodes of Unbelievable.

In the first episode of Unbelievable, Marie (Kaitlyn Dever) is in her apartment, huddled in a comforter, clearly in shock, obviously traumatized. Her former foster mother, Judith (Elizabeth Marvel), hands her a cup of water and tries to get her to drink it. She hears footsteps in the hallway outside. “Here they come,” Judith says. “Here comes help.”

, which debuted on Netflix last week and is based on a reported in 2015 by ProPublica and the Marshall Project, folds two narratives into its eight episodes. One, which manages to feel bleakly familiar and dumbfoundingly enraging at the same time, is about what happens when the people investigating a rape

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