2019-09-01 Emmy Magazine

36 EMMY

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THE BELIEVERS

A new Netflix series tells of two women detectives who join forces to track a serial rapist,

ultimately proving the importance of believing victims. Those who believed in bringing

the story to television were an unusually distinguished group.

The powerful eight-episode limited series, premiering September

13, doesn’t pretend to have all the answers — but it does open the lines of

discussion. Adapted from a 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning article from The

Marshall Project and ProPublica (“An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” by Ken

Armstrong and T. Christian Miller), the fact-based drama begins when a young

woman named Marie (Kaitlyn Dever) reports she’s

been raped in her Washington state apartment by

a man who bound and gagged her. After her foster

mothers begin to raise doubts and male police

officers point out inconsistencies in her account, she

concedes it may have just been a dream. However,

two dogged detectives (Merritt Wever and Toni

Collette) soon begin to unravel the truth as they pursue a possible serial rapist.

“The story is completely gripping on a human level and on a narrative

level, and it connects to a potent issue in our culture,” Grant adds. “Even

someone who has not experienced sexual assault can relate to the loss of

power and the tremendous gender imbalances. It’s an epidemic.”

There’s a piece of dialogue in the final episode of Netflix’s Unbelievable that

still haunts its showrunner. “A character points out that sexual assault is the

only crime in which people accuse the victim,” says Susannah Grant. “You know,

if you say, ‘Hey, I was carjacked,’ no one will say, ‘I don’t know — was she really?’

It’s different for victims of this kind of trauma. It’s a really interesting question we

need to ask ourselves.”

BETH DUBBER/NETFLIX

Merritt Wever and Toni Collette as the detectives of Unbelievable