Unbelievable

What Unbelievable shows is that you can make a scripted show about our broken criminal justice system that is as entertaining and human and likable and satisfying as any paint-by-numbers drama, if not more so.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is not a spoiler to say that watching Unbelievable is an extremely satisfying experience — not just for its storytelling, but for its depiction of women who confront their reality rather than succumbing to it.

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.

Gripping eight-episode series. ... It’s about a string of serial rapes (triggers galore), yet the writing and execution are refreshingly empathetic toward victims, procedure and justice.

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.

It's worth watching from beginning to end. ... The series has some points to make, which are variously worked into or laid on top of the action, but even when the script highlights statistics, it feels appropriate enough, and germane to the sociopolitical moment.

Gripping as a page-turner and also incredibly moving. [16-29 Sep 2019, p.25]

You can get past some inconsistencies and superfluous piety, though, on the sheer pull of the story and on the overall strength of the performances. Collette and Wever, two of the best actresses around, are great together.

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.

With Unbelievable, the creative team and superb cast treat the subject with the seriousness and grace it deserves, while also telling one hell of a story along the way.

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.

This series has things it wants to say: That it says them plainly is a virtue, and allows us to see the story more clearly. As a document of trauma, overcome both through justice and through a hard-won fight to find self-worth, “Unbelievable” soars.

"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.

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.

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.