There were two shows, though, that most forcefully signaled what was ahead. One, Netflix’s The Keepers, was a documentary series investigating the murder of a nun in Baltimore in 1969, and how the death of Sister Cathy Cesnik might be linked to the reported abuse of teenage girls by a Catholic priest, seemingly enabled by doctors and even police officers. Jean Hargadon Wehner, who spoke about the sexual assault repeatedly inflicted on her as a teenager in the series, wasn’t listed in Time’s recent Person of the Year tribute to “The Silence Breakers,” but her personal bravery in speaking out, documented by The Keepers’ director, Ryan White, and producer, Jessica Hargrave, heralded the narratives to come.

On the face of it, The Keepers was a true-crime story. Cesnik was killed, the show theorized, because she intended to shed light on incidents of abuse at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore reportedly perpetrated by Father Joseph Maskell. But through its seven episodes, what the series ended up focusing on was women: the survivors of sexual assault, who revealed the longterm impact it had on them, and the former Keough students who made it their mission to uncover exactly what had happened. “The Keepers is, of course, marketed as a mystery,” Anne Helen Petersen wrote at BuzzFeed. “But it’s also a survival story—and a testament to the ways that women, especially those no longer burdened by society’s opinion of them, can challenge systems of power.”

The Keepers also revealed how single reports of abuse and assault can have a domino effect, encouraging countless more women who’ve lived silently with their own experiences to speak out. After Hargadon Wehner and Teresa Lancaster anonymously filed a lawsuit together against Maskell and the Archdiocese of Baltimore in 1994, at least a dozen more accusers came forward. (The lawsuit, filed after the statute of limitations had expired, didn’t go to trial. Maskell, who died in 2001, was never criminally charged. The Archdiocese has paid $472,000 in total settlements to 16 women who alleged abuse by Maskell, though it has also attempted to discredit the show.) After the show aired, a dozen more women joined the fray, eight of whom filed reports with the Baltimore Police Department. As with the charges against Harvey Weinstein, one set of allegations snowballed into a chorus of voices—a phenomenon that later manifested itself in the viral #MeToo movement.

If The Keepers distinguished itself by focusing largely on the women who survived assault, a fictional Hulu show imported from Britain, originally made by Channel 4, did the opposite. National Treasure, written by Jack Thorne (the playwright behind Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), centers around Paul Finchley (Robbie Coltrane), a British comedian accused of a rape that happened two decades ago. The four-part miniseries was made in the aftermath of Operation Yewtree, a wide-reaching British investigation into historic sexual assault allegations in the entertainment industry sparked by the stories that emerged about the broadcaster Jimmy Savile after his death. The show is notable—and valuable—for how much time it spends with a character accused of atrocious attacks on women, who pleads innocence even in the face of growing charges against him.