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This essay examines how the 2021 HBO docu-series Allen v. Farrow destabilizes a “he said/she said” framing of historic child sex abuse accusations against Hollywood auteur Woody Allen. Joining a number of other recent docu-series on celebrity sexual abuse cases, Allen v. Farrow repurposes the long-form true crime structure to focus sustained investigative attention on sexual violence as a crime that demands social justice. Refuting charges that the piece is “biased” against Allen, the essay argues that Kirby Dick’s and Amy Ziering’s four-part true crime investigative series is in fact designed to interrogate the notion of “communicative injustice”. In its support of Dylan and Mia Farrow’s voices, the docu-series challenges the cultural logics of “bothsidesism” and reveals how a misogynistic media culture enabled a gendered cultural narrative that silenced Dylan and painted her mother as a scorned and vengeful woman. As part of a wider cultural turn toward re-evaluating gender roles of the 1990s, Allen v.Farrow invites reflection on the gendered cultural logic that saw a child-exploiting midlife female vendetta as a more intelligible cultural script than male child sexual abuse.

Female-centred serial programming that combines aesthetic exceptionalism and a rhetoric of progressive gender politics is a popular trend of Anglo-American television in the 2010s, tapping into a Zeitgeist of popular feminism as described by Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018). In some incarnations of the trend – and doubtlessly reflecting on the Trump and MeToo era – sexual violence, rape culture, and the psychological aftermaths of sexual abuse become focalised in ways that highlight the systemic nature of sexual violence and its key role in the makeup of the patriarchal social order; see, for example, the series Orange is the New Black, Jessica Jones, Alias Grace, Big Little Lies, The Handmaid’s Tale, 13 Reasons Why, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Fall, Unbelievable or Top of the Lake. As this list indicates, a large portion of this programming originates in “binge-able” Internet television, and is prominently featured on Netflix. Following from Susan Berridge’s (2017) observation, such prominence may speak to the allowances of the immersive binge-watching practice that Netflix encourages for its programming’s consumption, with the capacity to offer the viewer a sustained exploration of rape culture’s systemic nature, rather than treating sexual violence as a series of individualised and isolated incidents. This book chapter explores to what extent Netflix’s binge-able programming strategy and its effect on serialised narrative structures open up new avenues for interrogating rape culture in popular storytelling. Taking two Netflix original series (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Unbelievable) as case studies to analyse the binge-able serial format’s engagement with rape narratives, it also considers how this thematisation is shaped by factors such as the company’s branding logic, critical discourses around the cultural value of binge-watching, and the current political mainstreaming of feminist concerns around women’s bodily autonomy.

This article explores the politics of streaming sexual violence through the case study of Netflix Original 13 Reasons Why (2017-). Evaluating the observation that long-form drama with its extended temporality can engage with rape culture in more sustained and critical ways, this article argues that this is not necessarily the case. Tracking the ways in which Netflix hooks and trains its audiences to binge-watch 13 Reasons Why—in both its narrative hermeneutics and its structures of reception—I argue that those reception practices and narrative hooks, particularly around sexually graphic content, are cultivated around successive levels of intensity, similar to levels in a video game. In effect, sexual violence is gamified in 13 Reasons Why and is used as a structuring punctuation device for the full-drop season, which aims to keep viewers locked into Netflix’s streaming interface. I conclude that the seriality of 13 Reasons Why as a binge-able Netflix product places a premium upon the ‘next episode’ in a way that ultimately forecloses a deeper, more meaningful engagement with the serious issues of sexual violence and victimization. This article argues for the importance of examining how new technological and networked modes of delivery and response are shaping audience’s affective encounters/engagements with images of sexual violence in the digital streaming era.

Although it often goes unremarked, digital screens are a key point of commonality across the many different transnational renditions of the story of violence against girls and women found in contemporary TV crime drama. The Fall (United Kingdom, 2013–) and Top of the Lake (United Kingdom/Australia/New Zealand/United States, 2013–) are two striking examples of TV crime dramas that frame their self-conscious interrogation of rape culture through digital media. Considering the mutual imbrication of feminist politics and the deployment of new media technologies on these shows, this essay considers how the digital interface functions as a way of mediating viewer response to violence against women. Resisting a reading of digital technologies as either inherently oppressive or inherently liberatory, the essay explores how these TV series navigate the tension between the simultaneous violence of new media and its investigative/feminist/affective potential.