The man behind BBC Two's The Fall has admitted that he was taken by surprise by some criticism of the series.
One particularly harsh critic described the show as an example of "brutal misogyny" - an accusation that writer and director Allan Cubitt later called "insulting".
"I don't think I did quite anticipate that, because I was always very clear about what I was setting out to do," he's now told press including Digital Spy.
"The idea that I would explore male violence against women and refract that through the prism of a female central character [Stella Gibson, played by Gillian Anderson) who would discourse on this theme endlessly, from a feminist point of view, was the thing that made me feel that I could go into the territory of depicting violence against women at all."
The series follows Gibson as she hunts for Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), a killer who preys on young women in Belfast.
Cubitt argued that while the show "had to illustrate Spector's modus operandi to a degree", he was eager to "keep it as limited as possible".
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"I don't expect to be applauded for the fact that there is [only] one woman killed in The Fall," he said. "But I do think it's of note compared with so many other shows I see, where the body count is astronomical.
"You can watch one episode of Luther and see more female victims than you see across the entire run of The Fall. Series one of Spiral starts with a naked woman's body in a skip.
"But The Fall does something unusual - by virtue of spending 50% of its time with this individual [Spector], and inevitably therefore I'm sort of humanising him on some level, much as I'm saying he is a malevolent force."
Cubitt added that critics shouldn't make the assumption that he somehow shares some of Spector's views.
"If you write a drama that tackles male misogyny, then there's always the danger that people are going to say that you're identifying with the misogynistic character in some kind of way - which I'm not!"
The Fall returns to BBC Two on Thursday, September 29 at 9pm.
Watch a chilling trailer for the new series of The Fall right here:
