It’s weird to discover that your main emotional reaction to a gruesome show about a serial killer is a sense of relief, but that’s how I felt while watching “Furious,” Hulu’s taut police procedural that ended its first season last week. The show, which at first came across like a high-gloss “Law & Order” analogue, turned out to be the anti-“Law & Order” — and, at the same time, the first true post-Epstein thriller.
“Furious” didn’t need to be this sophisticated to win me over. I am into most cop shows. And I am reliably fanatical about all cop shows that star cool actresses wearing very little makeup, bad poly-blend sweaters and giant stomping boots to make them seem driven mad to the point of unattractiveness by their fixation on righting the world’s wrongs. For years, like a lot of women, I’ve watched “Law & Order: SVU” as a kind of emotional balm — exposure therapy for the sexual violence that surrounds us, but reliably delivered with a safe and tidy resolution before the credits roll. Horrible things happen; jaded but capable detectives track the perpetrators down; something like justice gets restored to the world.
But “Furious,” a cat-and-mouse thriller loosely based on the 1987 film “Black Widow” and starring Lola Petticrew as an avenging murderess and Emmy Rossum as the agent on her tail, is not that kind of show.
At the risk of employing the summer’s most overexposed classical reference, “Furious” is a Trojan horse. It arrives dressed as exactly the kind of entertainment it intends to interrogate — a slick drama trading in violence against women as spectacle. Yet over eight episodes, the series reveals itself to be something more nuanced and ultimately more harrowing: a cops-and-killers show that doesn’t pretend that the system works, or that justice gets served.
Ms. Rossum, who developed “Furious” along with the show’s creator, Liz Meriwether, plays Alice Black, a former police detective turned F.B.I. special agent who’s sorting through the wreckage of an abusive relationship with another cop. Alice’s superior, Nora Washington, head of the F.B.I.’s sex crimes unit — played with breathtaking command by Quincy Tyler Bernstine — has run out of faith that the system she serves is capable of doing much of anything for the girls it’s supposed to protect. Mx. Petticrew plays Catherine, the terrifying killer who is also a terrified victim; trafficked as a girl, she is seeking revenge against the powerful men who abused her and her closest friend.
“Furious” turns out to be a mystery that’s less about whodunit (we know that from the very first scene) than who’s complicit — an indictment of a social system that damages and discards women and corrupts everyone it touches. It’s the first time I’ve seen onscreen a story that so precisely captures the day-in-and-day-out emotional toll of living in a society that perpetually victimizes, persecutes, undermines and abuses women — the physical, emotional, spiritual grind of it. The show never feels prim, scolding, or woke, but it also could exist only now, after years of the diligent, painful real-world exposure of the realities of patriarchal abuse of power, as demonstrated in the details of the Epstein case. It chronicles how vast, deep and far the corrosion travels, forcing a reckoning not just with what happened to these girls, but with who was entertained by the trauma the girls experienced and who got to look away.
“Furious” is a big-swing show with big-swing characters, who are damaged in lurid, grotesque, highly dramatic ways. But as I watched it, a slide show of scenes from my own life played subconsciously in tandem with the show: a superior’s hand on my thigh under the table at a bar after my first big professional win; showing up to interview a band backstage at the Bowery Ballroom for Rolling Stone and being barred by the bouncer because the band was “waiting for a journalist from Rolling Stone”; feeling a stranger’s fingers go up my skirt and inside my underwear on a crowded subway train, freezing, saying nothing. It also recalled scattered moments from the world I grew up in: that photo of Christine Blasey Ford from behind, facing down a wall of mostly stone-faced dudes on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Susan Sarandon’s character in “Thelma & Louise,” gun in hand, shaking, and telling an attempted rapist, “In the future, when a woman’s crying like that, she isn’t having any fun.”
“What’s the punishment for people who know what’s happening and do nothing?” Catherine asks one of her captives, and the show doesn’t pretend there’s a satisfying answer. Later, Nora puts it even more bluntly: No one cares about anyone who takes money for sex. “Furious” takes as its premise the grim reality that no one will fix this, and too few people care about the type of sickening, brazenly wide-reaching crimes against women presented here. Yet the show conveys a surprisingly thrilling, almost giddy hopefulness in the act of saying this out loud — in seeing the awareness and recognition of this reality as it passes, like an unspoken password of understanding, between the cop and the killer, then watching it inform and animate these characters’ actions.
There’s a pivotal scene in the sixth episode, one the show builds up to for weeks, after the two leads finally meet and are cornered together in a shower at a women’s shelter. Catherine calls out Alice on the fact that she never formally reported the abuse she suffered at the hands of her boyfriend — and does it in a way that’s so piercing, so perfectly designed to both deepen the bond between them and sharpen the social critique underneath it, that, oddly, I felt my shoulders relax as I watched. I also found myself in tears, shouting at the screen for Alice to explain herself.
When she did, her answer was chilling. “Because I was scared to make him mad,” she says, her eyes brimming. “Because I was scared everyone would say I was weak.” Then Emmy Rossum’s face shifts and you watch the rage come up underneath it. “And I didn’t [expletive] want to,” she says, seething.
That’s when I started laughing. “Furious” is often hilarious — that’s part of its uncanny originality, this being, after all, a serial killer procedural written by the woman who co-created “New Girl” — but this was not a funny scene. My laughter was a Joni Mitchell, “laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release” kind of moment, evoking that dusty millennial adage about representation mattering. The tears came because it felt good to watch a work of art this entertaining that also provided an outlet for a simmering river of toxic rage — the byproduct of decades of violations and marginalizations, both mild and severe, churning under the surface of my life and the lives of a lot of other women, including the ones onscreen.
“I know you’re frustrated,” Alice says to Catherine, in that same shower scene. “But I’m here now.” Catherine doesn’t believe her — she knows better than to trust anyone offering a way out of this hell. But she wants to believe her; she so badly wants to believe there’s a path forward. And that’s exactly how I felt about this show.
Lizzy Goodman, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011.”
Source photographs by Privizer/Getty Images and Disney/Sarah Shatz
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post I’m Furious. This TV Show Understands Why. appeared first on New York Times.
