Did she do it?

Alias Grace has Greg Bruce thinking . . .

For most of its shows, Netflix typically attaches three or four adjectives summing up their appeal. 13 Reasons Why is, “Emotional, Suspenseful, Dark”; Black Mirror is “Mind-bending, Chilling, Suspenseful, Scary, Ominous, Dark”; Master of None is “Witty, Quirky, Irreverent”.

Alias Grace carries just the one word: “Cerebral”, a label that is unlikely to induce viewing in anyone outside a university sociology department.

The show, about a young woman in prison for a double murder, goes beyond easy theories of good and bad and right and wrong. It embraces the idea that easy and comfortable theories of the world should not be trusted. It contains no dragons and is not driven by the fury of the righteous. So it is probably fair to call it cerebral.

Grace Marks is a woman who actually existed in the mid-1800s, but whose legacy was assured by having her story posthumously lodge in the mind of Margaret Atwood who wove it into a novel about the place of women in society, the nature of class, inequality truth and justice. Atwood recently told the New York Times that screenwriter Sarah Polley, who adapted her novel for the six-part series which landed on Netflix last week, understood that in the telling of the story, “the ambiguity mattered most”.

Much of the show is told through the prism of the meetings in captivity between Grace and a psychiatrist, Dr Jordan, who sits with her for long periods, trying to discern her mental state and her role in the killings at the story’s centre.

Grace tells him the story of a friend who died as the result of a botched abortion. She was killed not just by the abortionist, Grace says, but also by the man who impregnated, spurned and scorned her. “For it is not always the one that strikes the blow that is the murderer,” she says. The driving question at the narrative centre of Alias Grace is, “Did she do it?” and the show contains much beating around the bush, as everybody involved avoids answering it, almost as if it was the show’s least important question.

In a world filled with uncertainty and too many people filled with certainty — about themselves, about the reasons for the problems of the world, and about how to deal with it all — Alias Grace, in its small thoughtful way, is an antidote to all that: a show that recognises we are infinitely complex, and that our stories can rarely be easily reduced to questions of guilt and innocence. It also recognises that none of that precludes the fact they usually will be.