When They See Us is, in many ways, brutal viewing. Writer-director Ava DuVernay’s sweeping, four-episode depiction of what led to the wrongful 1990 conviction (and eventual exoneration in 2002) of a handful of teenage boys from Harlem — Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana — in the violent rape and assault of 28-year-old New York banker Trisha Meili on April 19, 1989 never flinches from its truth. The assault on Meili is, at a late point in the series, graphically reenacted, and it is made clear that she was victimized in an unthinkable way. But DuVernay is just as emphatic in affirming that NYPD detectives and New York County District Attorney’s Office prosecutors framed these boys and traumatized them into false confessions, triggering prison time of varying lengths and cruelty for each of them, embedding them in our collective psyche as the Central Park Five.