True crime is one of the most popular forms of storytelling there is right now. It’s also one of the most difficult to get right. After all, when a TV show or a movie is recreating and using real crimes to tell a story, how does it do so without exploiting the real-life victims involved or disregarding them in favor of focusing more on their attackers? A delicate balance between sensitivity and compelling drama must be found. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.
No TV show in recent memory walks that difficult tightrope better than Unbelievable. The acclaimed Netflix miniseries premiered five years ago this week after receiving very little promotion from its streaming platform. As a result, Unbelievable flew almost completely under the radar in the weeks following its release. That was frustrating to witness in 2019, and it’s still just as disappointing five years later.
Fortunately, the series is still streaming on Netflix, and its anniversary this week makes now the perfect time to finally seek it out. When you do, you may be shocked to discover that you’ve been missing out on the best true crime miniseries of the 2010s.
Unbelievable is all too believable
Co-created by Ayelet Waldman, Michael Chabon, and Erin Brockovich screenwriter Susannah Grant, Unbelievable is an eight-episode miniseries based on a 2015 article and 2018 book by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong. Both nonfiction pieces explore a real-life police investigation into a serial rapist who targeted multiple women in Washington state and Colorado from 2008 to 2011. Unbelievable, like its pieces of source material, tells two stories at once. It follows Marie (The Last of Us season 2 star Kaitlyn Dever), a young Washington woman who is raped and then intimidated by several harsh rounds of questioning from members of her local police department into rescinding her original report and claiming that she fabricated her entire story.
At the same time, Unbelievable follows the investigation led by two female police detectives, Grace Rasmussen (The Sixth Sense star Toni Collette) and Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever), into a serial rapist in Colorado. Eventually, it becomes clear that the man they are searching for is the same person who assaulted Marie years earlier. Unbelievable is, consequently, two shows in one. On a purely surface level, it is first and foremost an immensely engaging detective thriller about two women who are dead set on finding and capturing their criminal target. In addition to that, though, the series is also a heartbreaking and infuriating exploration of how America’s often unsympathetic, cold justice system doesn’t just make it hard for victims of sexual assault to be believed and treated with the sympathy they deserve, but also discourages them from coming forward with their stories.
Unbelievable doesn’t preach to an already converted choir
It is a testament to the elegance of Unbelievable‘s storytelling that it manages to be both of those things without devolving into preachy theatrics or feeling the need to spell out its themes. It lets the events of its story and the actions of its characters speak for themselves. Its first episode is, at times, a grueling piece of procedural drama, and purposefully so. It follows Dever’s Marie as she is so thoroughly let down and relentlessly doubted by not just the policemen assigned to her case, but also multiple people close to her, that she is eventually convinced that lying about what happened to her may be the only way to stop her entire life from falling apart. In case that wasn’t bad enough, the callousness of the justice system ensures that her life is almost ruined.
Unbelievable follows up its bleak, but necessary first episode by plunging straight into its Colorado-based police investigation. Wever’s Karen arrives on the scene of a reported rape and, in a few scenes that stand in stark contrast to those in Unbelievable‘s premiere, we are shown how even the smallest signs of compassion can help victims move through an unavoidably difficult process. Along the way, Unbelievable successfully illustrates the horror of sexual assault (via several extremely brief, dimly lit POV flashbacks) without forcing viewers to sit through gratuitous sequences of it. There is clear sensitivity in every creative decision that Unbelievable makes. It is a true crime drama made with the most empathetic of hands, and that allows the heartbroken, hurt emotions driving its story to reach operatic, tears-induing heights in its final episodes.
A trio of riveting performances
Empathetic may ultimately be the best word to describe Unbelievable. It’s a series tasked with wading into dauntingly dark waters, and yet it handles itself so deliberately and tactfully. There is thought apparent in every frame, and Wever, Collette, and Dever give three of the best performances of their careers to date.
In Wever’s Karen and Collette’s Grace, Unbelievable finds two detectives driven not just by their own hunger for justice, but also the responsibility they feel to the women who have put their trust in them. They are, in other words, the perfect figures to anchor Unbelievable‘s immersive, twisty central investigation. Dever’s Marie, meanwhile, emerges as a figure of resiliency and a vessel for the series to explore the winding, uneven path toward trauma recovery.
All three performances deserved the kind of award recognition that neither they nor Unbelievable itself actually received. The series was largely ignored in the months after its quiet debut on Netflix. Five years later, it still hasn’t been embraced as rapturously or loudly as it deserves. It is a true crime thriller that is every bit as compelling as any other, and it is made with more care than many seem to be crafted with these days. In its final few chapters, Unbelievable even finds a way to give its viewers something truly rare within the true crime genre: a cathartic release. That alone makes Unbelievable more moving and satisfying than most true crime shows you can watch on Netflix or any other streaming service these days.
Unbelievable is streaming now on Netflix. Need more recommendations? We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
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