Entertainment Weekly has graced Netflix’ “Unbelievable” with a B+ rating for its Friday premiere: Unbelievable’s Detective Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette) is mad. She and fellow Detective Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) have been investigating a serial rapist for months, and progress is painfully slow. When FBI agent Billy Taggart (Scott Lawrence) seems to downplay a potential lead, Grace explodes. “No one is looking at this data about violence against women! I mean, what if men were raped at the rate women are?” she asks Karen. “What if Taggart were afraid that someone was going to f— him in the ass when he’s walking home from the grocery store at night?… Where is his outrage?” Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica article and created by Oscar-nominated writer Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich), Unbelievable is a sturdy true-crime drama, but where it excels is as an examination of the gap between the male and female experience. When a teenager named Marie (Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever) reports being raped in her Lynnwood, Washington, apartment, it doesn’t take long for police — and even Marie’s former foster mother Judith (Elizabeth Marvel) — to start doubting her story. After all, what’s more likely — that a masked man methodically terrorized Marie at knifepoint, or that the troubled teen, who had been known to act out, made it all up for attention? The action then jumps forward three years to Colorado, where Detective Rasmussen and Duvall are investigating two separate but very similar rapes. When Grace and Karen talk to the survivors – who each live alone and say their attacker took pictures of them and made them shower after the assault – they listen. When a victim feels guilty for blocking out details of her attack, Grace and Karen say things like, “Please don’t apologize for doing what you needed to do to feel safe.” They understand in a way that their male colleagues, quite frankly, cannot. The complete review can be read over at Entertainment Weekly.
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