Warning: This article features a discussion about sexual abuse. Reader discretion is advised.
Netflix's new drama Unbelievable tells an intelligent, sincere, and unflinchingly honest story about sexual assault that is all the more horrifying because it is absolutely true. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica article "An Unbelievable Story of Rape," the show follows an 18-year-old rape victim, Marie Adler (Kaitlyn Dever), who reports the attack to police in her Washington hometown and is then accused of lying based on minor inconsistencies in her story. Over the course of the incredibly hard-to-watch first episode, Marie is discredited by her own former foster mother, bullied by police into admitting that she made up the attack, and ostracized by her friends—all while dealing with the very real trauma of her very real rape.
The series then expands into a second storyline several states away, following Detectives Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) and Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette) as they investigate a string of rapes in Colorado. Though they don't yet know who Marie is, the rapist they're hunting is the same man who attacked her. Once he's apprehended, the detectives uncover evidence that vindicates Marie, proving her story was true all along.
Showrunner Susannah Grant, who co-created the series and wrote and directed several episodes, sat down with BAZAAR.com to discuss adapting the story from T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong's reporting at ProPublica, break down several key scenes, and dig into the "systemic problem" that Marie's story exposes.
Episode 1 of the series is entirely focused on Marie—her assault and the immediate aftermath. It's not until Episode 2 that the investigation with Merritt Wever's and Toni Collette's characters is introduced. How did you decide on that structure?
One of the great things about streaming services that drop all of the episodes at once is that it changes how the viewer consumes it. What we learned from Netflix, as we were figuring out how to plot out that first and second episode, was that a lot of their viewers watch in two-episode bites. That gave me the room to think about the first part of the story as a two-hour chapter, rather than thinking I have to introduce a lot in that first episode, which would be the more standard approach if you were doing this for a network. To have the brilliant Toni Collette involved and have the freedom to hold out on introducing her until the end of the second hour is great. It's a testament to the loosening of the reins of devices and rules that have existed in television for a long time and are really being thrown out of the window to the betterment of our storytelling, I think.
One of the interesting choices you make up front is to show glimpses of the assault as Marie is describing it to detectives. To me, that felt like you were confirming for the audience that she is telling the truth, rather than having it be at all ambiguous for a viewer. Was that your aim?
I'll be honest, I wasn't trying to guide the audience toward believing or not believing her. I just wanted to tell the story as she was experiencing it and also tell the story of the detective as he was digesting it. There are people who watch the show and when Marie says "No, there's no rapist out there," they believe that she is telling the truth then.
That’s fascinating!
There are people who believe those flashbacks you see are what she is imagining, as opposed to what she is remembering. I don't mind that either, because I think in a way, that makes them complicit with the detective, who is not a villain. He is not a horrible person. He is somebody who is making decisions based on a set of assumptions that a lot of us in our culture hold about what a reliable narrative should sound like and how a victim of rape should behave. I wasn't intentionally trying to make it clear that she was telling the truth, nor was I trying to deflect from that either.
A lot of that reaction probably also depends on whether you’ve read the article and are already familiar with the story.
Yeah, I think people who are new to [the story] feel a little less confident at the end of the first episode.
What kinds of conversations did you have with Lisa [Cholodenko, who directed the pilot] about how much of the assault to show?
It was something I was very specific about on the page, what we see and how we see it from Marie's point of view. It was important for storytelling reasons, because her narrative is the one that gets called into question, but also because there are so many instances of sexual assault that are voyeuristic and automatically exploitative, and that was just absolutely not going to work in this show at all. That became clear to me the first time I sat down to write that first scene. I thought the only way we could do it and convey the real impact it has on her is to shoot it almost all from her perspective. The same is true with Amber (Danielle Macdonald). There are shots of both of their faces later in their recollections, but at that point, you've been in their point of view so long that even those shots feel subjective.
Lisa brought in the idea of Marie just appearing in her photo at the beach. The photo at the beach was something that was in the script as something that was very important to her, and we had the idea of her actually dissolving into it as an escape mechanism during the assault, which was a really awesome contribution. Then when you see her do it again with the detective, you've already seen her do it once and you know on some level that this is how she copes with the unbearable.
The first episode also shows, in really vivid and awful detail, the process that victims have to go through. Marie is forced to retell the story again and again to the point where it almost feels like a sick joke. Can you talk about how you depicted that reality?
One of the things I have heard for years now about the investigation of a sexual assault is that a lot of victims feel like the investigation itself is a second assault. It was sort of a given in my mind because I had heard it so much, but once I started working on this, I really wanted to unpack that and show why that is true in a granular way, and feel the humiliation and pressure on her as the process goes on.
I've watched the first episode with an audience twice now, and both times the biggest audible gasp was when the detective puts a pen and paper down in front of her and says, "Okay, now write your statement." You can feel an audible exhale from everyone of disbelief that she has to go through that again. That was important to me. I just felt that if rather than just hearing the phrase that it's a "second assault," we all go through that once with someone we care about, maybe we'll come out understanding it better and care about it more ourselves.
How involved has the real Marie been with the show?
She is an executive producer, and she was available to us. Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller, the journalists who wrote the initial article, did so much great reporting and they made all of that available to us. There was a lot that we had, including the research materials they had gathered when they did their reporting. So there wasn't much we needed to go to her for, but she was very selflessly available to us for questions as they came up.
The dynamic with Karen and Rasmussen is fun because we've seen so many versions of that "odd couple cop duo" relationship with men. Were you deliberately playing on that trope or conscious of the comparisons to shows like True Detective?
There was mention of the show Cagney and Lacey, which I never watched growing up. I wasn't thinking so much about detective show tropes and playing into it or playing against it, but one thing I was really intrigued by in [the real story] and wanted to tease out was the notion that these women were both working in really heavily male environments and had different ways of managing that. I liked the idea of them coming together and having a partner that is different than the partners they've had in the past and feeling one plus one equals a lot more than two, in terms of having a critical mass of women in the workplace.
One of the most powerful lines in the show is when Marie’s lawyer notes that nobody ever accuses a robbery victim of lying. This is a really big question, but do you have a sense of why there is this systemic tendency to disbelieve sexual assault victims?
That's the big essay question, right? We live in a patriarchal society, although sexual assault is certainly not the domain of just women. There's a report out [recently] that says up to 10,000 men a year are sexually assaulted in the military, so it is really not exclusively a women's issue. But it is predominately a women's issue. And it is seen as a women's issue. And in a patriarchy, women's issues are going to get less attention.
Why do we spend less money on research in women's health? It's a big question. Rather than digest the why, I prefer to think about how to direct the conversation now, because it does feel as if in this country, people are starting to get really hungry to have the difficult conversations that we've been avoiding for a long time, especially younger people. I am so endlessly inspired by the younger people I know who are flinging open the closet doors and pulling out all that crap we've had hidden in there that we haven't wanted to look at. They seem very hungry to really have the difficult conversations, because they're the ones who are going to be living with the fallout of that denial.
Detective Parker, the lead detective who questions Marie's story and effectively bullies her into saying she lied, isn't treated as a two-dimensional villain. He has a moment in the finale where he's confronting the idea that he might be a bad cop. How did you figure out how to depict that character?
There was a real key in [Armstrong and Miller's] reporting to how I decided to portray him. I'm not sure whether it was in the article or the book, but it describes the moment in real life when he finally finds out what a huge mistake he's made. He's described as being absolutely devastated, and I kept that in mind from the get-go. I thought, This is not a bad man. This is a man who probably loves his wife and takes great care of all the women in his life, and he didn't have the proper training for this. He'd spent most of his career in narcotics and was relatively new to sexual assault investigations, whereas the cops in Colorado had a lot of experience with it, so they understood the nature of the trauma on the brain and memory.
It's a systemic problem, a cultural problem, if you look at the numbers: Somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of sexual assaults are ever reported, and then of those, maybe at the most, 5 percent are prosecuted. That's not a problem of one or two bad detectives. That's a cultural problem that's supported by misapprehensions we all must be carrying around with us to allow this to continue. I was more interested in having someone who the audience could relate to, thinking that his mistakes might in some way make the audience complicit with those misjudgments. That seemed more interesting to me.
The phone call between Marie and Karen in the finale is so cathartic, because you're sort of waiting for them to meet or interact through the whole show.
The phone call came from the truth. [Marie] did call her, eventually. Throughout the whole piece, one of the things I found so moving about it is that I sort of had this image in my mind: In one part of the country, there's this young woman who is trying desperately to stay afloat in seas that are getting increasingly rough and trying to pull her down. In a whole other part of the country, without even knowing it, these two women are building her a lifeboat. That was an image I had in my mind. I liked the idea that just by doing their work as well as they could and as thoroughly as they could, they helped not only the women in their immediate sphere, but someone hundreds of miles away. That felt like the appropriate way to end the show.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture, mental health, and true crime. She loves owls, hates cilantro, and can find the queer subtext in literally anything.
