Furious Is More Than Just Angry

In Elizabeth Meriwether’s new thriller series, Furious, as in our world, girls and women are bought, sold, traded, and used by men who get away with it. Law enforcement knows it. Society at large knows it. And yet this abuse continues, day after day, month after month, year after year — a system of inequality that should inspire extreme action and is instead something that’s as ingrained in our reality as our taxes funding illegal wars and corporate pollution turning the climate to shit. “What’s the punishment for people who know what’s happening and do nothing?” Lola Petticrew’s serial killer asks in Furious, and the series, galvanizingly and crushingly, treats that as more than a hypothetical.

Furious abides by the structure of a cat-and-mouse chase between Petticrew’s character and Alice Black, played by Emmy Rossum, the FBI agent on her tail, to fit in with our expectations for this kind of narrative: Episodes are punctuated by the NYPD and the FBI trying to outdo each other and are populated with victims cowed by fear and exhaustion. But as the eight-episode season moves forward, it shifts out of recognizable geometry and into non-Euclidean spaces with angles and fissures that are all the more interesting because they don’t initially make sense. Characters make choices that go against their own self-interest. The story zigs and zags, then doubles back on itself to excavate previously unknown details. This is a confidently written and paced show that inspires viewers to share its confusion about our world and wonder whether we should find hope in the righteousness of vengeance.

Premiering with three episodes on Hulu on July 27, Furious begins, of course, with a murder, but there are no cutaways to spare us from watching this death, no blurry flashbacks. An incapacitated man crawls on the floor of his opulent brownstone, and Petticrew — whose character is at first nameless, and shall remain so here — has no sympathy. She’s girlie, even coquettish, as she brandishes a glittery pencil case housing a syringe full of deadly fentanyl. “I don’t really like listening to you. I don’t like the sounds you’re making. But I love your smile!” she chirrups as she watches him die, and Petticrew, who strong-armed the camera into aligning with her perspective whenever she was onscreen in Say Nothing, immediately sets the tone for Furious. If we worried about that man without wondering what he might have done, why? If we decided that Petticrew is a villain without wondering what might have happened to her, why?

Meriwether’s commitment to thoroughly sculpting female protagonists has established a spectrum of different kinds of womanhood across series as varied as The Dropout, Dying for Sex, and New Girl, and Furious pushes that approach into a new genre. Meriwether and her collaborators — including Rossum, who developed the series through her production company — are obsessed with cause and effect, with tracing back actions and reactions to what might have been their starting point, then pushing backward even farther, and Furious often asks viewers to consider many things at once about its characters. After presenting Petticrew’s young woman in all her contrasting flirtiness and fortitude, it introduces Alice, another enigma. Her backstory comes out through tossed-off insults from the men around her: She was the daughter of a cop, an NYPD detective in her own right, and the girlfriend of a domestic abuser who also happened to be her colleague. (How Alice tries to make sense of that abuse by incorporating it into her sexual appetite is one of the series’ most intriguingly thorny aspects.) She left the NYPD after her ex Marshall (Jake Lacy) knocked her around one too many times, and now she’s starting over at the FBI as a “baby agent” answering phones. When that man from the brownstone turns out to be the son of billionaire Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie), Alice gets a call from her old partner Danny (Scoot McNairy, inventing a new hangdog expression every time he appears). The NYPD doesn’t want the case, since Jay donates so much money to their affiliated organizations, and Alice has always had a flair for pulling apart cases that look too neat. She doesn’t think this was an overdose, and Danny believes her.

With that first investigation as its jumping-off point, Furious assembles its cast of characters, weaves together its plot, and adds texture to every crime-drama cliché. When the NYPD and FBI launch a joint task force, Alice gets paired with experienced agent Nora Washington, played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine, whose sex-crimes unit is banished to the basement (cliché) and who views Alice as an inexperienced interloper; just because the two are both women investigating crimes against women doesn’t mean they’re immediately going to be friends (texture). Nora may always be half-drunk (cliché), but she’s not a fool, and Bernstine can communicate a hundred different kinds of contempt in one flicker of a look (texture). Petticrew’s character has only one real confidante, a young man named Alden (Steve Way, the series’ welcome comedic presence) who adores her unconditionally (cliché) and doesn’t mind ignoring the more questionable aspects of her personality, her obvious lies, and her simmering anger (texture). As the task force ramps up, Alice, Danny, and Nora’s investigation into the Eastons implicates an array of New York elites (cliché) but also generates a number of crunchy, ambiguous conversations about what keeps our society running (texture).

Furious is inspired by the 1987 film Black Widow, which was also about a female law-enforcement agent chasing a female serial killer, and it can occasionally be too on the nose with its emphasis on gender imbalances. Rossum’s Alice as the only woman in a room full of sneering male FBI colleagues is probably an homage to that iconic elevator frame from The Silence of the Lambs but doesn’t add anything new. A character who Petticrew seduces for information feels straight out of a cut scene from Promising Young Woman, a faux-liberal man claiming to be unable to orgasm without calling his sexual partner a slut. Those moments guarantee a knee-jerk reaction — look at these shitty men, doing shitty things — but Furious is more interesting when it gets granular about these female characters’ often-contrasting reactions to the opposite gender. What makes women favor ambition or security over solidarity? What qualities do women recognize in each other, and detest, because it reminds them of compromises they themselves have had to make? Sometimes Furious feels like a natural descendent of Under the Bridge, which also paired two unlikely female protagonists to unravel a horrifying crime, and sometimes Furious feels like it’s shouldering the lost mantle of Y: The Last Man, which followed the formation of feuding female factions in a world without the Y chromosome. However, neither of those shows had actors taking swings as huge as Rossum and Petticrew do here.

Since her time on Shameless, Rossum has kept tackling characters with outside-the-norm relationships to femininity — Angelyne was entrancingly bizarre, and disappointingly underseen — and she keys into a different frequency as Alice, balancing the character’s deep self-loathing with a nearly feral survival instinct. The same goes for Petticrew, who anchored Say Nothing’s portrait of radicalism and here plumbs her character’s mania for moments of quiet woundedness, as when she practically shrugs lines like, “My memory sucks. It’s ’cause I got strangled so much.” How the two women gradually bend toward one another, each unintentionally evoking the other’s simultaneously recklessness and methodical nature, feels like the series’ thesis statement about the ways in which nature supersedes nurture, how maybe there’s a seed of commonality between women that could grow into something powerful if we let it.

Furious names its sixth episode after an exchange in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot about how the dead “make a noise like feathers,” a line followed by similarly weightless similes like leaves, ashes, wings, sand — things that can scatter and drift away on the slightest breeze. Is out-of-sight, out-of-mind ignorance toward evildoing the key to a civilization staying on an even keel? Meriwether, Rossum, and the series’ creative team refuse to abide by that bargain. Victimized girls and women who sound like feathers deserve more weight than they’ve been given, and Furious, by tapping into the anger we should all be feeling, strives to give it to them.