Netflix released Unbelievable on September 13, 2019, and it wastes no time on comfort. Kaitlyn Dever plays Marie Adler, a young woman charged with a crime for reporting she was raped after police decide she made the account up. Across the country, two detectives work a string of attacks that start to look like the same man.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Marie Adler and the Charge
The premise lands hard because the machinery around Marie is ordinary. She reports an assault. The police doubt her. The doubt hardens into a charge against her, not against anyone else. Dever carries the early episodes, and the show never lets the audience look away from how a victim becomes a suspect.
Toni Collette and Merritt Wever
Toni Collette is Detective Grace Rasmussen. Merritt Wever is Detective Karen Duvall. They do not share scenes at first. The series splits its time between Marie’s collapse and the two detectives closing on a serial rapist, and the structure pays off when the halves finally meet.
- Created by Susannah Grant, Ayelet Waldman, and Michael Chabon
- Executive producers include Grant, Waldman, Chabon, Sarah Timberman, Carl Beverly, and Katie Couric
- Eight episodes, one season, released all at once
A Pulitzer Prize Article as Source
The show is based on the 2008–2011 Washington and Colorado serial rape cases. It draws from “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” the 2015 article by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong for ProPublica and The Marshall Project, and from their related 2018 book A False Report. That reporting won a Pulitzer Prize.
It follows a woman who was charged with a crime for reporting she was raped after police believe she fabricated her account, and two female detectives who investigate a spate of similar attacks.
The supporting cast is deep. Danielle Macdonald joined the main cast in July 2018. Kai Lennox, Austin Hébert, Dale Dickey, Omar Maskati, Elizabeth Marvel, Liza Lapira, and Eric Lange took recurring roles that August. Vanessa Bell Calloway joined in September 2018.
What the Awards Say
The series collected a Peabody Award. It earned Best Limited Series nominations at the Critics’ Choice, Golden Globes, and Primetime Emmys. All three leads were nominated at the Critics’ Choice, where Collette won, and at the Golden Globes. Collette also drew Primetime Emmy and SAG Award nominations.
Our Verdict
Eight episodes is the right length. The show trusts Wever and Collette to carry procedure without turning it into a puzzle box, and it trusts Dever to hold the quieter, worse story at the center. The split narrative is the risk, and it mostly works, because the detectives’ hunt keeps circling back to the question the first act raises: what happens when the system decides a woman is lying.
The Peabody and the nomination haul are not noise. They mark a series that treats a true-crime story as a study of institutions rather than a thrill ride. Unbelievable is not flawless — the middle stretches, and the two timelines take a while to lock — but its restraint is the point.
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