Can I Tell You a Secret? is a two-hour long documentary that hardly needs to be that long. The stories of the female victims are urgent and important, but the editing doesn’t do them favors. They’re dragged by repetitive music, repeated stock videos, and relentless reenactments, which seem cheesy and unnecessary. The docuseries also buries what I believe should be the main point: misogyny. It’s misogyny that allowed the perpetrator, Matthew Hardy, to harass his female victims for more than 10 years without real consequences; misogyny that blamed the women for sharing revealing photos; misogyny that made the police dismiss their cases as trivial and unimportant. It’s clear that these women need to be taken seriously for anything to get done. Unfortunately, the documentary doesn’t seem all that interested in doing that.

At this point, Netflix documentaries are a parody of themselves. The streamer partners with different production studios across different countries, but somehow, in the end, they all carry the same look, sound, and feel, which was intriguing at first, but now feels trite.