Unbelievable Review

Susannah Grant, Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon split the story in two. In 2008, in Lynnwood, Washington, Marie Adler reports a rape, is questioned until her account wavers, and is charged with false reporting. In 2011, in Colorado, two detectives from different suburban departments realise they are chasing the same careful, patient man. The show cuts between them, and the gap between how Marie is treated and how the Colorado women are treated is its whole argument.

Kaitlyn Dever's Marie has spent her life in foster care learning to say what adults want to hear, and Dever lets that habit become her undoing without once asking for sympathy. Merritt Wever and Toni Collette, as detectives Karen Duvall and Grace Rasmussen, are a mismatched pair, one soft-spoken and meticulous, the other blunt and impatient, and the pleasure of their scenes is watching competence: car records, databases, a victim interviewed with care over every word. Collette won the Critics' Choice award, and the series a Peabody.

The look is plain television, serving the material without adding to it, and the Colorado episodes settle into a procedural rhythm, a lead, a database search, one step closer, that satisfies more than it surprises. The script states its argument about who gets believed more often than it dramatizes it. What lingers is Lisa Cholodenko's first episode, in which Marie tells her story again and again to officers who hear the inconsistencies and never the woman.