How Depictions of Sexual Assault on TV Are Changing

As a newly avid fan of The Sopranos, I admire the show for its storytelling grandeur. The Sopranos broke boundaries when it premiered in 1999. The show is famous for its depiction of violence at a turning point in television history where no show had depicted such brutal activity before. Fans of The Sopranos expect to see violence and have no problem watching it. I certainly didn’t. However, there was one portrayal of violence in the show that was harder to stomach.

In season three, Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi is shown being brutally attacked in a parking garage by an unknown stranger. The scene depicts the act of rape dramatically and realistically. That gruesome scene is the only scene in the series that has haunted me daily, even more so than the ambiguous cut-to-black finale scene.

I was appalled when I first saw it. I understand that, like everything else in The Sopranos, the instance was important to the plot and the characters. I don’t question why the assault happened. Yet, I wonder why the choice was made to show the assault so graphically and for so long. At 18:25 minutes into the episode, Dr. Melfi is first attacked in the parking garage by a stranger who beats her and drags her to the stairwell for about 20 seconds of screentime. The visual start of the rape happens at 18:57, and goes on for about forty seconds until the rapist leaves Dr. Melfi bruised and traumatized in the stairwell at 19:33. One minute and eight seconds doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but it felt like an eternity watching it for the first time.

I thought surely Dr. Melfi, a well respected character on the show, didn’t deserve to be seen by the audience at such a devastatingly low point. Even as a TV fanatic who won’t shy away from watching anything, it was difficult to see Dr. Melfi’s assault.

The Sopranos is not the only culprit of violent and realistic rape scenes. We’ve seen it in The Handmaid's Tale, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Mad Men, and Orange Is the New Black. Shows like American Horror Story and Game of Thrones make a habit of it. It’s worth noting that physical assault is not always shown on screen in programs. Many shows simply allude to or suggest the occurence of rape and sexual assault; Downton Abbey and Scandal to name a few. 

Still, sexual assault has been depicted and discussed on screen for quite some time. In her book “Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence” Lisa Cuklanz traces assault on television back to 1976. She details that beloved shows like All in The Family, Dallas, and The Rockford Files have used rape as a plot device. However, Cuklanz notices that rape was most frequently handled “in such a way that definitions of masculinity remained at the core” and that “most rape-centered episodes through the early 1980s were aired on detective or police dramas and that they depicted rape as a violent surprise attack.”

Sexual assault, as daunting and complex as the topic is, was clear cut and simple on screen during TV’s formative years. Rapists were portrayed as scary strangers, while men and cops were the heroes who absolved the victims of their grief (and their story time). Portrayals and discussions of sexual assault have evolved greatly in this new golden age of television. The influx of programs and the freedom of pay-television has opened the door to a wider variety of challenging topics in storytelling, especially the topic of sexual assault. 

Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You largely focuses on sexual assault. The show beautifully and deliberately crafts a narrative that treats victims of sexual assault with respect while educating its characters and audience about the stigma of assault. The show highlights the fact that there is not just one clear-cut definition for sexual assault. It is more nuanced than the scary strangers from programming in the 1980s.

These different types of assault, attempted rape, coercion, statutory rape, and harassment, have also since been hot topics on television. Jennifer Fox’s TV movie The Tale addresses child sex abuse, while Orange Is the New Black and Pretty Little Liars portray statutory rape. Yes, these depictions are not always self-aware or tasteful, but they open the medium to the larger discussion of rape culture within American society.

Lisa Cuklanz explains in her writing that social change and rape reform are directly tied to the depictions of rape both onscreen and in the news. “As primetime genres evolved to include more complex people and relationships,” Cuklanz says, “they also moved toward emphasis on the complexity of justice.”

I May Destroy You and The Tale are perfect examples of the evolution Cuklanz described. Both display victims of sexual assault at the center of the story and allow their characters to grieve. These depictions of assault are not meant to shock or evoke fear, but to pay respect to the victims of assault and bring to light the societal systems that enable assault.

Television is reflective of the population that watches it. As Lisa Cuklanz so brilliantly puts it: “the dramatic shift in thematic coverage...shows that television fiction as a whole responds to, and thus participates in, social change in profound ways.” As we become more aware of the types of assault and the perpetuation of rape culture, television fiction will too. Thankfully with writers like Jennifer Fox and Michaela Coel paving the way, we can expect to see more nuanced and respectful depictions of survivors on television.