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Positive:
23
Mixed:
2
Negative:
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Critic Reviews
ColliderSep 13, 2019
Season 1 Review:
All three leads delivering powerhouse performances that make it feel as though they’ve been embodying these characters for eight years rather than eight episodes. ... While the writing is definitely elevated by the quality of the cast, the script is lean and moves along at a snappy pace, striking a perfect balance between exhilarating tension and deep despair, and explaining just enough of its technical procedural elements to never leave the audience behind.
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Sep 9, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Unbelievable, one of the best crime dramas in recent memory and one of the best shows of 2019. ... Wever and Collette both create fully authentic women who ooze integrity but also have enough insecurities and make enough mistakes to seem like actual human beings instead of stock “good cops.” Dever does beautiful work as the damaged, achingly vulnerable Marie. ... Unbelievable is a superb example of what show-don’t-tell storytelling looks like.
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Sep 11, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The performances from Colette, Wever, and Dever are uniformly excellent, with Dever equally parts devastating and subtle. Frankly the entire cast, and Macdonald in particular, does terrific work, but the series belongs to those three. ... Unbelievable is a series of such quiet power that its full impact may not come crashing down until after its conclusion.
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Sep 13, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Karen and Grace's tentative partnership is in turns comedic, antagonistic, judgmental, and extremely supportive, and Wever and Collette's chemistry is pitch perfect. ... The obstacles to reporting rape and other crimes of sexual nature are still to this day, astronomical. But the women of Unbelievable make it feel like justice could be within our grasp.
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Sep 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
If that sounds tedious, it isn't. Unbelievable, the rare crime drama with no bang-bang and scarcely any on-screen violence of any kind (even the rapes, seen only from the eyes of blindfolded, trussed-up victims, are confused and fragmentary), is still a relentlessly compelling binge-watch event.
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The Daily BeastSep 12, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It’s a thrilling, searing, and most of all rage-inducing telling of negligence, institutional misogyny, and victim injustice. It’s also an impressive, no-frills procedural. ... The series is yet another reminder that hard-to-watch and must-watch are descriptions that are no longer mutually exclusive.
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Sep 12, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Thanks to the strong writing and the finely calibrated performances by Wever and Collette, there’s nothing stale about the execution of the timeworn buddy-cop formula. ... This is a smart and knowing investigative procedural, a stylish but never exploitative true-crime story, an insightful character study — and one of the best series of the year.
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RogerEbert.comSep 10, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Some of the dialogue between Karen and Grace can be a bit superficial and clichéd, but it’s a TV sin that’s easy to forgive given how much the actors bring to the roles. For every line that Collette delivers that sounds a bit regrettably over-written, there’s a choice she makes as an actress that re-balances the scales. And as spectacular as Collette and Dever are here, it’s really Wever’s show. She literally never strikes a false note.
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The GuardianDec 4, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It could’ve been another drab procedural, heavy on cliches borrowed from a thousand crime stories before it. Thankfully, it manages to find another way, by focusing on the grey area of its title. ... It’s about who gets to have their story heard, who is allowed to be believed. It’s about the power dynamics that underpin the criminal justice system and society at large.
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Sep 18, 2019
Season 1 Review:
While not a spotless transition from article to script — some of the dialogue is a touch stilted and the in-station investigation scenes has some elements of a dramatic “Criminal Minds” breakthrough — it’s very much a “show, don’t tell” portrayal of the real-life events and fallout, which lands in a must-watch spot that is thought-provoking without being preachy.
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Sep 18, 2019TV Guide MagazineSep 16, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Gripping as a page-turner and also incredibly moving. [16-29 Sep 2019, p.25]
Sep 10, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Unbelievable is remarkably adroit, striking a tone that easily could have wallowed in misery instead. Yes, it's hard to watch at times, especially in its opening installment, but it's simultaneously smart, carefully crafted, occasionally funny and told with a narrative economy I consistently admired.
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Sep 4, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The show can get didactic, shoehorning statistics into dialogue and repeating easily inferred points about how police tend to botch rape investigations. Subtlety comes from the actors, not their dialogue. ... Unbelievable isn’t light viewing. But in defending reality against received wisdom and eschewing suspense in favor of insight, it makes a plea for revising simplistic rape narratives that should be impossible to ignore.
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Sep 13, 2019
Season 1 Review:
"Unbelievable" has such an unbelievable story at its center that the clunkiness grates less as the episodes go on. The series is a warning, a devastating example of the consequences of not believing women. But the writers successfully prevent it from becoming pedantic or hacky. This isn't an after-school special about rape. The blunt, unbecoming direction delivers the message without interference.
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Sep 11, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The dialogue is just as heavy-handed about passing along stats about sexual-assault reporting as any episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. But its strength of focus keeps even the more formulaic parts from becoming stale. The series is just as invested in how survivors cope—and the socially acceptable ways in which to do so—as it is in how law enforcement can let them down.
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Sep 12, 2019
Season 1 Review:
This tale of unusual decency and competence feels nearly as depressing as the criminal sadism they’re investigating. Duvall and Rasmussen are based on actual detectives, but the show’s universe is so bleak they don’t entirely feel a part of it—or of ours. Unbelievable so meticulously catalogs the endless multitudes, terrifying randomness, and near inevitability of darkness that it makes it hard to see the light.
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Sep 4, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Unbelievable commits to shedding light on the shortcomings of law enforcement, from the mishandling of sexual violence cases to the prevalence of so-called “bad apples” within police forces. The series, however, addresses these systemic issues heavy-handedly and delivers its didacticism in stilted dialogue.
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