The controversy at the centre of Allen v. Farrow is a sort of zombie scandal, a story that keeps lurching back into the limelight, just when you thought it was good and dead. It stems from a now nearly 30-year-old accusation by Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, who claims that Allen sexually assaulted her at her mother’s Connecticut summer home in the year 1992. The incident was notable not just for its horrifying details and famous cast, but for its existence within a second, more conventionally sordid celebrity drama. The allegations against Allen came in the midst of a messy split from Farrow, after it was revealed that he’d been having an affair with her 21-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

While two separate investigations were launched into Allen’s possible misdeeds, it was the Soon-Yi debacle that dominated both the press coverage and public conversation when the story first hit. Even I, then a 10-year-old kid living in the boonies of rural upstate New York, remember seeing headlines about it in the Arts & Life section of the local newspaper. But by the time the case against Allen was dismissed, thanks in part to a report from the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital that determined no abuse had occurred, the public consensus was largely in his favour. Not that Allen didn’t have issues — the man had been in therapy since birth and once wrote himself into the role of a sperm, for Pete’s sake — but a paedophile? No, said the gossip hounds and film fanatics. Surely not.

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Of course, the thing about public consensus is that it’s changeable — and even malleable, if conditions are favourable and the proper pressure is applied. And while Allen continued making films, and telling stories, his accusers stood by theirs. The assault allegations first resurfaced more than 20 years later, after Allen was honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the 2014 Golden Globes. New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof published a letter from Dylan Farrow in his column at the paper, and questioned Hollywood’s continued support of Allen: “The standard to send someone to prison is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but shouldn’t the standard to honour someone be that they are unimpeachably, well, honourable?”

In 2016, Ronan Farrow, Dylan’s brother, renewed the allegations in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter. A year later, Dylan spoke out again, this time in the LA Times. The cultural tides began to turn: actors who’d worked with Allen in the past publicly denounced him; his new film struggled to find an American distributor; and the publication of his memoir was cancelled after employees at Hachette staged a walkout. (The book was eventually released by another publisher.)

And now, three years after the peak of the #MeToo movement, comes a new entry — the “definitive” entry — in the form of Allen v. Farrow. And it’s perfectly attuned not just to a changed political landscape, but a moment of cultural obsession with documentary crime series that make the audience feel like part of the story.

The Farrow camp has asked why the same movement that took down Weinstein didn’t catch Allen under its wheels, a sentiment that’s repeated in the first episode of Allen v. Farrow: “He was able to just run amok while I was growing up,” Dylan Farrow says, her voice full of incredulous frustration. The running amok in question was not criminal or even deviant — Allen is the peculiar #MeToo figure for whom only a single, isolated incident of misconduct is alleged — but it was a life, a fruitful one, and wasn’t that just as bad? If this was a story of good versus evil, Allen’s outcome was the worst sort of twist: here was a villain who not only escaped punishment but thrived in his freedom, so untouchable that not even a movement explicitly founded on the dispensation of justice for long-ago crimes could topple him. As fairytale endings go, this one positively sucked.

But in the era of Serial and Making a Murderer, this apparently glaring miscarriage of justice is the stuff prestige TV is made of — and you, the audience, are part of it. Not just watching but participating, nudging the universe another degree in its incremental path toward justice. Sometimes, the thrill is in correcting the mistakes of overzealous prosecutors, a righteous quest to free the protagonist who was found guilty, yes, but nevertheless seems innocent. But sometimes, and this is even more exciting, you get to catch the bad guy. The audience plays cop, judge, jury, and executioner. The police couldn’t punish the perpetrator, and now it’s up to us; if we all work together, we can make him pay.

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Allen v. Farrow is best understood as an attempt to draw us into a narrative that is gripping, outrageous, scandalous, horrifying, and most of all, definitive. This TV series is meant to be the final draft of Woody Allen’s biography: you’ve heard this story before, sure, but this time it’s the official version. The one you remember him by. The one that ensures that when the 85-year-old dies, his obituary headlines describe him not as Woody Allen, Oscar-Winning Director, but as Woody Allen, Alleged Child Molester. (Allen has described it as a “hatchet job”.)

It should come as no surprise that Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick are the team behind the scenes on Allen v. Farrow. These filmmakers often present the “definitive” take on issues like this, which is a nice way of saying that they flatten away the complexity and nuance of a story until what you have is a tale so one-sided, so simple, that it goes down like a communion wafer. Take it on faith. Swallow it whole. Though they bill their work as documentary, the team prides itself on not giving a microphone to whomever it plans to paint as a villain; in a screenshot of a 2013 email that has been circulating online, an associate of Ziering and Dick assures a source that she and her collaborators “do not operate the same way as journalists,” promising “no insensitive questions or need to get the perpetrator’s side.”

This full-throated commitment to incuriosity is a hallmark of Dick and Ziering’s work, which also includes the 2015 film The Hunting Ground, an examination of sexual assault on college campuses that has been broadly criticised for using discredited data and playing fast and loose with the truth. When Ziering was asked by the Boston Globe what people could do to combat the scourge of campus sex crimes, she replied, “You can believe the survivors.”

You can believe — and Ziering is here to help you do it. Her films are something beyond truth: they create the narrative that becomes the official story, drowning every doubt or alternative theory in blazing certainty. The Allen v. Farrow series promises to tell you everything you need to know about the allegations against Woody Allen, yet the information provided over four hour-long episodes points exclusively to his guilt.

What’s in the blurred-out text of the New Haven report from which only a handful of incendiary, out-of-context words have been highlighted? Why are Dylan Farrow’s allegations treated with the utmost respect, while Moses Farrow’s claims of abuse by Mia are dismissed, with a scoff, as fabrication? What was happening in the moments before and after Mia trained a camera on Dylan and asked her to describe where her father touched her? What aren’t we seeing, hearing, being given the chance to consider? Don’t ask. It’s not part of the story.

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The documentary is haunted by the spectre of recovered memory — only instead of the victim, it’s the viewing public being asked to confront the truth they’ve been hiding from all these years, to edit their understanding. It’s a tactic that has been effective, even important, for addressing past wrongs within the framework of #MeToo: to think again about that encounter that left you feeling grimy, to revisit, reframe, and ask yourself if maybe it wasn’t your fault after all. For individual women, retelling the story in a different way can be a powerful means of illuminating the grey areas between consent and coercion, or violation versus regret.

But as a means of shaping the public understanding of decades-old allegations, it feels more like propaganda pushed on us by powerful people with tons of cultural clout. Ziering and Kirby’s history of deceptive filmmaking is one thing, but even Ronan Farrow, who appears frequently in Allen v. Farrow as his sister’s staunch defender, has often blurred the line between journalism and activism in his quest to unmask MeToo’s biggest villains. Writing about the work that became Ronan Farrow’s book about Weinstein, Catch and Kill, Ben Smith at the New York Times noted, “[Farrow] delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic.”

In other words, it’s not that Ronan Farrow makes things up. It’s just that he doesn’t like to interrupt the narrative with pesky doubts, quibbles, or caveats. Like this documentary, his work favours a good story over a messy truth.

At the end of the day, Allen v. Farrow is about establishing a narrative more than it’s about changing anyone’s mind. The information it contains is the same information we’ve always had, just repackaged as brave and groundbreaking for the Serial era, in which documentaries are supposed to make a difference — and in a lost year in which the only “safe” activity is sitting at home and watching TV. In this year of no socialising, no sporting events, and very little new content as Hollywood struggles to produce amid pandemic restrictions, here is a chance to feel something. To do something. To be on the right side of history, and be a hero of sorts, instead of just watching them in reruns.

But this is a rerun, too. It’s a story we’ve all heard before, a reboot of a horror show that never should’ve been made into a tabloid spectacle the first time. And no matter how much we might like to think so, tweeting our outraged intent never to watch another Woody Allen film again will not make the world a safer, kinder place for victims of abuse, most of whom will never see their stories told once, let alone over and over. That there’s nobility, even justice, in staying in on Sunday night to watch a premium cable documentary series about a 30-year-old celebrity breakup might be the biggest lie of all.

But we don’t want to think about that. Never mind all the kids who were abused yesterday, who will be abused tomorrow. Tell us the one about the bad little man in the attic again. Maybe this time, it’ll have a happy ending.

He is, as he says, a pariah now, stalked by accusations that he sexually assaulted his seven-year-old daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992, and contempt that he married his partner Mia Farrow’s daughter Soon-Yi Previn in 1997.

The title Apropos of Nothing is typical, combining, as it does, the nihilism and pseudo-intellectualism that is Allen’s signature. Concerning Nothing would be better; I am Nothing better yet; Nothing best of all, and I will call it that for brevity and emphasis. It is an interesting book, but not a good one, especially from a man who was nominated for the best original screenplay Oscar 16 times and won it three times. It is, rather, a sullen defence filled with anecdotes without texture. For instance, Allen writes that the other great Jewish comedian, Mel Brooks, liked him. I wanted more, but perhaps Allen isn’t interested in other great Jewish comedians.

Mostly, it reads like a witness statement with digressions about Ingmar Bergman, his hero. He calls Mia Farrow a narcissistic abuser of children (she bore four and adopted 10) and writes that, had she been reasonable, the three children they shared — Dylan, Moses and the writer Ronan Farrow — would have tolerated his relationship with Soon-Yi as merely “unorthodox”.

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I gasped at that; does he have no concept of betrayal? Does he not know what he did? He calls himself a good father, although Dylan says he assaulted her, and Ronan tried to stop the publication of Nothing; the children he adopted with Soon-Yi, he says, have money hurled at them.

He is not a good father. Nothing is a work of denial and self-deception, then; of gawping at young women; of anecdotage, including a note of every suicide in Farrow’s family. His response to #MeToo is basically #WhoMe? It is pitiable: a man who spent his career analysing himself hit a dead end. He ran out.

Only rarely does something heartfelt leak out, and when it does, it feels like a mistake, a loss of concentration, for instance this: “Finally, I enter the world. A world I will never feel comfortable in, never understand, never approve of or forgive”. Forgive?

Or this: “I managed to turn out nervous, fearful, an emotional wreck, hanging on by a thread to my composure, misanthropic, claustrophobic, isolated, embittered, impeccably pessimistic”. Impeccably? These lines made me want to watch his films again, because they are more telling than Nothing, and so I did. They are 40 years of barely disguised biography in which, hiding behind the nebbish, the fool, who is his stock character and his disguise — he maims women and himself.

Everywhere, there is betrayal. He obviously wonders, in Nothing, why so few people believe he did not assault Dylan Farrow, despite two investigations which did not lead to charges. I think I know. He has been baiting his audience since Manhattan, hiding on a 40-foot screen. No wonder he has depression. Suddenly, with Soon-Yi, they knew who he was, and he wasn’t funny anymore.

Allen was the most successful comedian of the 20th century. People think he is a filmmaker, but he is really a comedian. And, in the way of comedians, his work is both a shield and a riddle waiting to be solved. Anyone who knows comedians knows that depression, not joy, is their natural state. The laughter is merely the antidote; the bigger the laugh, the greater the void. Lenny Bruce killed himself with morphine. Joan Rivers maimed her face because she thought she was repulsive.

The early films — Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Sleeper — are silly and joyful, but the protagonist is not the essential Allen. After these, he began to write more personally, to spool his neurosis into film after film; to finesse the nebbish he depends on, because the nebbish does not have to take responsibility for anything. His success was artistically a gift, but with terrible emotional jeopardy. What do you do with that kind of power to deceive?

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Here it is in Manhattan, in which he seduces 17-year old Tracy — Mariel Hemingway, speaking like a 35-year-old woman who speaks like Woody Allen (“Everyone gets corrupted”) — to praise then, and disgust now. It is in Hannah and her Sisters, which had a rare happy ending — amid the usual intimate betrayal — and in Husbands and Wives, in which he deceives the Mia Farrow character with a very young girl (Juliette Lewis) as they were breaking up in life.

In Stardust Memories, he plays a famous film maker who despises his audience and falls in love with an insane woman; his character, incidentally, lingers in front of a poster that says ‘Incest’ as he defends himself from charges that he flirted with a 13-year-old-girl. In his masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanours, a respectable Jewish optometrist (Martin Landau) has his mistress (Angelica Huston) murdered. It is a rumination on guilt.

In retrospect, and only in retrospect, we see him, and it is no longer charming. It feels, rather, like another betrayal. He did covet very young girls. He did destroy his family. He plagiarised their lives. In Hannah and her Sisters, Mia Farrow’s real mother Maureen O’Sullivan played her on-screen mother as a drunken bawd. It was very close to the truth. “How can you act,” she asks, “If there’s nothing inside to come out?” I think that, for Allen, betrayal is love. That would explain why he stayed with Soon-Yi. The scope of the betrayal of Farrow nourished him.

“He always attracted to the crazies, the nutcases,” says Jack, (Sydney Pollack) in Husbands and Wives of the Allen character, “deep down somewhere he knows it’s not going to work, so he suffers and that kind of atones for some kind of early on guilt over what I don’t know”.

He writes in Nothing that his mother beat him daily, but he doesn’t dwell on it — nor did the critics, though it was the most interesting thing he wrote — and it flies away. She “always”, he writes, took the side of “anyone who hates me”.

I found the films brilliant but desolate, because a distinct post-war Jewish identity grew around Woody Allen, and it is self-hating. For a certain type of Jew, liking Allen’s work was a signal of status, and belonging. For non-Jews it signified a liking of Jews; a solidarity. This identity was born in the Holocaust, of course; he was born in 1935.

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He wrote, for me, the best line on the Holocaust in cinema in Hannah and her Sisters. “You missed a very dull TV show about Auschwitz,” says Frederick (Max Von Sydow) “more gruesome film clips, more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question, ‘how could it possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is: why doesn’t it happen more often?”

That bitterness — that truthful cynicism — is what I want to hear. I don’t want Liam Neeson in Schindler’s List crying, “one more life”, with a redemptive ending patched on because Steven Spielberg panicked.

This identity is irreligious, existing to be thwarted — secular Judaism is flimsy — which is interesting, because Allen is like that too. But there was chosen-ness of a kind. Allen’s work is filled with pseudo-intellectualism — he taught me to namedrop Freud without reading him, he taught me to betray my readers — contempt for the homely, or religious, kind of Jew (his Jews are ghastly stereotypes) and social aspiration.

He mocked the New Yorker in cinema; in life he pitched to them. He mocked Hollywood in Annie Hall; in life, he demanded to star in What’s New, Pussycat?, the first film he wrote. In Nothing he writes with pride of his penthouse in the sky. That is the reason for his infamous attachment to Manhattan. It isn’t Brooklyn, where he was born. In Venice he stays at the Gritti Palace. In Paris he stays at the Ritz. He’s like the dentist he despises. His mother wanted him to be a dentist.

The self-hatred is so obvious; why couldn’t I see it? Was I laughing? The women — the love — are always unavailable. They are drug- or sex-addicted; too remote; too crazy; too young. Even if they weren’t, he would ruin it.

In Crimes and Misdemeanours, the nebbish plagiarises a love letter from James Joyce, and I can think of nothing more pitiful from a writer. In Stardust Memories he fantasises about placing the brain of a kind, plain woman in the body of a beautiful, mad one; but, he says later, he’d want the remnants instead: the mad drab. He cannot be happy.

Stardust Memories contains, for me, his essential revelation. An alien tells him, when he says his life is meaningless: “You’re not superman, you’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service, tell funnier jokes”. He used an alien for comedy, but it only exacerbated tragedy. He wanted to be a great film maker, but he remained a comedian. He collected none of his four Academy Awards. You could call it a peculiar kind of vanity, or you could call it imposter syndrome; his films leak shame. I think he is a great artist, though parochial. I am certain he would not agree.

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When I first read the Soon-Yi story, I thought he should fire his shrink. He is famously in therapy, but narcissists are almost impossible to cure. And, like a narcissist longing to be found out he has goaded his audience to know him and suffers when they do; and Nothing is his surprised post-script. “I’ve seen it all before,” says a critic in Stardust Memories, “they try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art”. “The way your lead character views women,” Rain (Juliette Lewis) tells him in Husbands and Wives, “it’s so retrograde, it’s so shallow”. He kisses her on her 21^st birthday and returns to Mia Farrow.

His work, then, was a brilliant deception on himself and others that, in the end, failed; when his audience realised they had practised the same deception on themselves, they ceased to believe anything he said. They stopped laughing.

Perhaps this is right, and he is a greater artist for being known — and loathed — than he was when misunderstood. I certainly find the films more moving now. He has exposed comedy for what it is; you could call that generous, even revolutionary, but it was probably unconscious. The work remains a luminous study in post-war Jewish self-hatred, and it will endure, but he has not morally survived it. He could not. Perhaps he should have listened to his mother. He should have been a dentist.