For Grant, who served as showrunner and an executive producer, the series, which also stars Merritt Wever and Collette as detectives based on, though not named after, Galbraith and Hendershot, is an opportunity to highlight the importance of experience and training when investigating sexual assault cases.
Unbelievable was nominated for four Golden Globes, including acting nods for Dever, Wever and Collette, and Collette, also a SAG Award nominee, has already won a Critics Choice Award.
“It’s worth noting that the detectives on which Merritt and Toni’s characters are based had had, the Toni character had had more than a decade of sexual assault investigation experience, Merritt’s less but still a considerable amount, and the man you saw in this [first episode] who led the investigation had recently come over from narcotics and I think it was his second or third sexual assault, so he was untrained,” Grant, who previously penned Erin Brockovich, among others, told The Hollywood Reporter in July 2019. “We talked to those detectives and to hear them talk about what that experience has taught them about what happens to the brain in trauma and how that changes and how you talk to them and question them and advise is—no wonder it gets messed up. People need to be trained.”