The Misandric Makers Of TV Drama

From Little Big Lies to Broadchurch and Doctor Foster to Fearless, why do the makers of TV dramas hate men?

By Amanda Platell: The captivating TV drama Liar tackles one of the most contentious issues of our age - sexual consent.

When it started I thought ITV might break new ground by telling the story of a false rape claim and how it ruins a man's life.

Liar begins after loopy schoolteacher Laura (Joanne Froggatt) breaks up amicably with her long-term partner and goes on her first date with widowed heart surgeon Andrew (Ioan Gruffudd).

She flirts, he responds. She's needy, he's feeling needed. They end up back at her place kissing, both having drunk several large glasses of wine.

Cut to the next morning, Laura wakes alone and decides she has been raped. The police are called and Andrew's life falls apart as he protests his innocence.

But which one of them is the liar?

This week we found out. And the answer was, predictably, the man. It turned out the doctor had not only spiked Laura's drink with a drug before raping her, he had done the same to his wife's best friend, driving his wife to suicide.

And he isn't the only vile male creep in the drama. Laura's ex is such a cad he was sleeping with her sister while they were still a couple.

The message couldn't be clearer and is, of course, straight out of the feminist handbook — all men are rapists . . . no one can be trusted.

How much more interesting it would have been if Laura had been the liar. If she had falsely cried rape and put an innocent man in the dock. 

At least that would have had the virtue of reflecting the growing problem facing British justice.

Last week, the Mail featured 14 separate cases of men who were accused of rape, had their names dragged through the mud and were then cleared. 

In most of these cases, the men claimed the women had been willing partners, while the women insisted they were too inebriated to have given consent.

Top barrister Cathy McCulloch wrote in the Mail this week that more and more men's lives are being ruined by disputes over consent. 

Her advice to any young man is not to sleep with a woman who's had even one drink.

'The law is simple,' she says. 'If a woman has had a drink, and says after sex she did not have the capacity to consent, the man can be accused of rape.' 

Whatever the rights and wrongs of all this, hers is a sad comment on modern dating.

But one thing is certain: modern TV dramas don't paint men as victims. 

From Little Big Lies to Broadchurch, Doctor Foster to Fearless, I can't think of a single successful recent drama where the man is not cast as a psycho, a killer, a sadist, an adulterer or a wife beater.

I am not in any way diminishing the horror and seriousness of rape, but how disappointing that a drama with such potential descended into yet another male-hating diatribe.

Men deserve better than that.

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