Hannah and Chuck’s encounter dances around some unspoken dynamics of harassment. The power game can be as mental as it is physical. Often men who hurt women help women in other ways, and that can be self-serving too — supporting women’s work might open up new opportunities to take advantage of them, woo them with flattery that ends up entrapping them in a kind of complicity, or help shield the men’s reputations against unseemly accusations. Mostly, the episode questions whether knowing a man personally can help clarify the strength of allegations against him. In fact, it seems to obscure the question: The more Chuck becomes known to Hannah, the more the women who accused him become abstracted. Hannah’s not thinking about them when she’s laughing and talking with him, and neither are we.

That’s why it was so unnerving to watch Ms. Dunham use her own friendship with a man to try to publicly discredit an accusation against him. Ms. Dunham has parlayed her “Girls” fame into a real-world feminist brand, complete with newsletter, podcast and a Twitter feed followed by more than 5 million that serves up insights like: “Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don’t lie about: rape.” But this month, when the actress Aurora Perrineau accused Murray Miller, a writer on “Girls,” of sexually assaulting her in 2012, when she was 17 years old, Ms. Dunham changed her tune. Along with the “Girls” collaborator Jenni Konner, she released a statement claiming that “our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.” (Mr. Miller has denied the accusation.) On Twitter, Ms. Dunham dug in further: “I believe in a lot of things but the first tenet of my politics is to hold up the people who have held me up, who have filled my world with love,” she wrote.

But what’s good for one woman isn’t necessarily good for women in general. Doing good doesn’t mean you’ve never done anything bad. And as Ms. Dunham so smartly explored in “Girls,” knowing someone isn’t the same as knowing what they’ve done; abusers can conceal their crimes even from their closest friends. Ms. Dunham has since apologized for putting a “thumb on the scale” in the unresolved case. But her example shows that even the most carefully aligned politics can be overwhelmed by the pull of personal and professional relationships — especially in Hollywood, where every connection is fortified with influence and wealth.

Of all the shows that have taken on harassment this year, the comedian Tig Notaro’s Amazon series “One Mississippi” pulls off the sharpest rebuke of men like Louis C.K., in part because a plotline in the second season was inspired by him. Ms. Notaro was mentored by Louis C.K., and he was a producer on “One Mississippi,” but recently she cut ties with him, urged him to address the harassment allegations publicly, and wrote a workplace harasser into her own show.

“One Mississippi” stars Ms. Notaro as a radio personality with a complicated relationship to her Mississippi hometown. When a producer at her network masturbates in front of a co-worker and friend, Kate (played by her real-life spouse, Stephanie Allynne) Tig goes on a rampage on her behalf. She storms into the masturbator’s office (he denies it), then brings Kate to tell their boss. He finds the account hard to believe, he says, because the masturbator is “so progressive!” Finally, Tig is on the verge of outing the masturbator live on her radio show when Kate reminds her that she doesn’t have the license to publicly air Kate’s experience. So Tig takes to the airwaves to tell her own story, of being molested by her step-grandfather as a child.