Will #MeToo finally make us question violence against women on TV?

Spoiler alert: The following contains details of the third episode of "The Romanoffs," now streaming.

Time is not exactly up. 

More than a year after the #MeToo movement was started by allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Harvey Weinstein, a new TV series written by a man accused of harassment has arrived on Amazon: "Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner's "The Romanoffs." 

As the fallout from our national reckoning about sexual violence and gender politics continues, many have wondered how, when or if men who have been accused of sexual misconduct should return to their work. 

For men accused on the less criminal end of the spectrum, there are no widely agreed-upon solutions. Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari performed surprise stand-up comedy sets, and Jeffrey Tambor and James Franco appeared in new seasons of "Arrested Development" and "The Deuce," respectively. 

Whatever the answer, the right move is certainly not what Weiner has done in the third episode of "Romanoffs," "The House of Special Purpose". The episode, which takes place on the set of a TV show rife with abusive behavior, is not unlike C.K. making a rape joke during his "comeback" – inappropriate and angering. Whatever intention he had with "Special Purpose" (written before he was publicly accused, he says), the message it sends in the context of #MeToo is radically different. And that new message is not a good look for Weiner, who has denied the accusations.

"Mad Men" alum Christina Hendricks stars as Olivia, an actress who travels to Austria to film a miniseries about the Romanoffs, a family of Russian royals. It's a navel-gazing setup from the start, for sure, but things only get worse as the 88-minute episode progresses. On the set of the project, Olivia is emotionally, physically and sexually abused by the cast and crew, repeatedly, until a final horror leaves her dead. 

Olivia's main abuser is Jacqueline (Isabelle Huppert), an actress-turned-director and a stereotype of a crazed old woman. Jacqueline gaslights and mocks Olivia, encouraging others on the set to do the same. At one point a male co-star (Jack Huston) attacks Olivia in a scene, claiming to be "in the moment" as he feigns a sexual assault that wasn't in the script. Olivia calls her agent, Bob (Paul Reiser), and begs to escape, but he belittles her and warns she could be seen as a "difficult" woman.

And in the final act of Olivia's degradation, she is kidnapped and thrown into a room with her fellow actors, where seconds later she believes bullets are flying as the people around her start falling and bleeding. To Olivia, it seems as if her co-stars are being murdered and she's next, and she screams, cries and collapses. Of course, it was all Jacqueline and Bob's plot to get a more realistic performance of terror from Olivia, for the big Romanoff death scene. But when they go to check on her, she hasn't fainted: she died, seemingly of fright.  

More:'The Romanoffs' review: 'Mad Men' creator makes a sparkly, self-indulgent mess on Amazon

There's an uneasy and exploitative feel to "Special Purpose." That Olivia's torment is put on display for the audience's entertainment is wrong. That it's so specifically akin to the stories of women's real trauma on Hollywood sets makes it worse. A defender might say it's not promoting abuse, because the abusers are the villains, but that doesn't really matter. The main offense is that Olivia's anguish is a prop used for shock value and cheap laughs. 

As Hollywood reckons with what happens behind the camera in the wake of #MeToo, we also have to pay attention to what goes on in front of it. Representing women as victims and playthings whose pain is ignored only contributes to a society that views women that way.

Even before #MeToo, Hollywood's track record in portraying women onscreen is spotty at best. Dating back decades  (from "King Kong" to Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen films), female characters have been put through constant maltreatment in stark contrast with their male counterparts on the big and little screens.

"Game of Thrones" has been dogged by criticism of its depiction of sexual violence, which is seen as gratuitous. Crime dramas like "CSI" – which aired on CBS, formerly run by Leslie Moonves, another Hollywood man accused of harassment and assault – objectified women by using their dead naked bodies as literal props for the weekly murders, and we still see similar objectification on shows like "Criminal Minds" and "NCIS."

One violence-against-women trope is so prevalent that fans use the terms "women in refrigerators" (or "fridging") to describe instances when female characters are killed or harmed in order to motivate the male hero. The term comes from an issue of 1990s comic "Green Lantern" but has come to describe everything from the premise of Netflix's "The Punisher" to Andrea's death on "Breaking Bad" or Rita's on "Dexter."

And those are only a few examples of Hollywood's problem with representing violence against women. Its problem with just creating realistic, non-stereotypical female characters is another battle. 

The abuse in "Special Purpose" is particularly grating coming from Weiner. In 2017, Kater Gordon, a writer on “Mad Men,” accused Weiner of sexual harassment, describing an incident in which he allegedly demanded to see her naked. Gordon has since left the entertainment industry and started a foundation to combat sexual harassment. 

Weiner, his writers and many executives at Amazon had plenty of time between Gordon's accusation and the debut of "Special Purpose" to rethink whether the episode should even be released. A fictional TV studio where a woman is physically and psychologically terrorized, created by a man himself accused of bad behavior on his own former show, is ill-advised at best, and trolling at worst. 

"Romanoffs" has managed to meld the film and TV industry's penchant for hurting women onscreen with the very real problems offscreen. Beyond Gordon's allegation against Weiner, so many other stories of harassment and assault on film and TV sets have come to light in the last year. That pain should not have been dramatized in such an irresponsible way, and certainly not by an alleged harasser. 

More:The cachet of monarchy: How 'The Romanoffs' travels the world of would-be Russian royals

Television has the unique ability to rapidly respond to events in the real world in a way that film doesn't, because of how quickly it's produced. In the past year, many series have aired "#MeToo" episodes, usually dramatizing the downfalls of characters like Weinstein or Kevin Spacey or Matt Lauer. Those episodes run the gamut from cringeworthy to empowering, but they mostly assume something that "Romanoffs" does not: that the #MeToo era is the start of some kind of change. In that context, series that follow the old Hollywood habits when it comes to portraying violence against women – series like "The Romanoffs" – feel not only distasteful, but dated. 

Whether it's serial killer victims on crime shows, violent rape on "Thrones" or abuse on "The Romanoffs," Hollywood just keeps churning out the same old stories of violence against women.

And time should be up for them.