BoJack Horseman and A Teacher opened up a new chapter of #MeToo stories

The final leg of the series sees BoJack both assuming responsibility and being held responsible, using its signature trenchant writing, as well as the visual panache Hanawalt cultivated for years. The same type of dry-erase boards that once listed fake Oscar nominees now bear witness to BoJack’s misconduct, though the worst is saved for last. BoJack is challenged to rethink his “fuck-ups,” as is the Hollywoo(d) public—and the audience. The litany of offenses is undeniable, and BoJack is exiled.

The last two installments stray from BoJack storytelling form; the penultimate episode, “The View From Halfway Down,” seems to bring things to a conclusive end with a series of heart-stopping moments. And it’s the series closer, “Nice While It Lasted,” that offers the most devastating moment. The final scene, in which BoJack and Diane stare up at the cobalt blue sky, leaves so much unsaid between the two characters. But BoJack Horseman’s final episodes delivered what few productions have dared to do since we as a society began to reckon with predators and the power dynamics they’ve benefitted from. Along with offering a glimpse of what closure could look like for survivors (the Fireflame billboard is a great background gag and a triumph for Stephanie Beatriz’s Gina Cazador), BoJack Horseman, in the series’ most meta-moment yet, showed what it looks like to hold abusers—including your faves—responsible.

Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher, which premiered November 10 on FX on Hulu, heads toward similar territory, though it takes a very different path to get there. Fidell’s expanded her character study from 2013 into a quietly powerful rumination on who is viewed as a victim and who is deemed a predator. The limited series centers on Claire (Kate Mara), an attractive 30-something teacher painfully aware of the rut she’s in, but too invested in her self-denial to change anything. Her life is full of obligations, not aspirations; it always has been, Claire thinks, as she’s had to put everyone else’s needs before her own. So convinced of her own altruism is she that when she meets Eric (Nick Robinson), a prepossessing high school senior, Claire almost immediately offers to tutor him for the SATs. And because she continues to believe she has very little control over her life, it’s years before she’s able to see that she was already exerting undue influence over a teenager. She tells Eric he’s smarter than his friends; after learning he wants to be pre-med at University of Texas at Austin, she takes him on a campus visit. Claire shares a little too much of her own life during these encounters, sits a little too close, encourages Eric to call her by her first name. In short, she’s grooming him, though she believes their relationship is equitable because the attraction is mutual.

FX on Hulu includes a disclaimer about the abuse and grooming ahead of each episode, but for the first half of the series, Claire and Eric’s relationship is shot dreamily, their exploits set to the kind of swelling music found in romantic films. This manipulation of the audience, a subversion courtesy of Fidell, mirrors the manipulation of Eric, who initially believes he was in a relationship with someone who happened to be older. His feelings about what happened change over the course of A Teacher’s 10 episodes; when he first has sex with Claire, he shouts, “I’m the motherfuckin’ man,” to himself. Years later, when asked about the abuse in college, Eric downplays what happened, even though it’s clearly taken a psychological toll on him, because men can’t be, or aren’t supposed to be, victims. After one last time jump, Eric recognizes he was abused, which, though an important step, is just the first in a long journey toward healing.

Fidell’s narrative is made of up two distinct parts, including the fallout of Claire and Eric’s relationship, because, as the director has said, “The story doesn’t just end when the headline comes out.” In the first several episodes, Fidell creates space, though not exactly empathy, for Claire’s motivations. Like BoJack, Claire also came from an abusive background, but her version of “acting out” was to bottle everything up—her anger, her desire, her fear. She views her behavior with Eric as a kind of latent teen rebellion, which would be pathetic if it weren’t so destructive. Early on, the story plays like a fantasy because it’s Claire’s fantasy, one in which she’s in a gratifying relationship and gets to be a mentor. Even after she’s been arrested, Claire struggles to see herself as an abuser. For Claire, abusers are men like her father, whose own self-destructive behavior robbed her of a childhood. Her mistake, she says, was in allowing herself to be caught up in her own and Eric’s feelings.

In its final episodes, which we won’t give away here in their entirety, A Teacher begins to grapple with the consequences of Claire’s actions, and who is actually bearing the brunt of them. There’s a feint toward a happy ending, and a stirring speech: “I have to live with this forever. And so do you.” But the four hours of storytelling that come before the finale have plenty of narrative heft and groundbreaking twists on their own. Like BoJack Horseman, A Teacher contemplates redemption, but not before reform, and certainly not before acknowledging an offense has been committed. In focusing on the aftermath of abuse and on historically overlooked victims, both series contribute to a new chapter of #MeToo stories.