Synopsis: FBI agent Alice Black is on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating female serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur.
Stars: Emmy Rossum, Lola Petticrew, Scoot McNairy, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Jake Lacy
Created By: Elizabeth Meriwether
Rated: TV-MA
Running Length: 8 episodes
Movie Review in Brief: An FBI agent hunting a killer who might understand her better than anyone on her own side of the badge. Furious snuck onto Hulu with almost no fanfare and turned into the summer’s meanest, saddest surprise.
Furious Review: No Warning, No Mercy
Hulu has a habit of dropping a series onto the schedule with almost no runway and letting it find its own audience, and Furious is the latest to appear as if from nowhere: eight episodes, a cast far better than the marketing suggested, and a pedigree that starts with creator Elizabeth Meriwether, the woman behind New Girl, The Dropout, and Dying for Sex.
The premise traces back, very loosely, to 1987’s Black Widow, Bob Rafelson’s neo-noir psychological thriller with Debra Winger as the investigator and Theresa Russell as the woman she can’t stop watching. That one did modest business on release, built a devoted following in the years since, and I count myself in it, so take this as a compliment to both: beyond the one-line hook of a woman in law enforcement hunting a woman who kills men, almost nothing survived the trip, and the show is better for it. Ronald Bass, who wrote the Rafelson film, executive produces here.
I’ve seen all eight episodes, and there are light spoilers below that stop short of the finale. Fair warning on another front too: there’s no simple way to describe this show. I’ve tried, on friends and in drafts, and every attempt sends me off on a tangent about some other layer of it. Watching it is a different experience entirely; it tracks clean, episode to episode. Furious is nearly impossible to summarize and completely easy to watch, which is the best problem a series can have.
Two Women, One Coin
Alice Black (Emmy Rossum, Beautiful Creatures) is working a duty-agent desk at the FBI which is a polite way of saying she’s been sidelined. She was a Brooklyn cop, and she reported her then-boyfriend Marshall (Jake Lacy, Carol), a respected officer in the same department, for abusing her. What followed is what usually follows. The department closed ranks around him, treated her as the problem rather than the victim, and made her position impossible. That’s the blue wall, and it functions exactly as designed: protect the badge, isolate whoever threatens it, and let attrition finish the job.
So when her former partner Danny Kelly (Scoot McNairy, Nightbitch) calls her in on a high-profile overdose that doesn’t add up, she has to walk through a crime scene full of people who know her story before she can get anywhere near the body.
Masks, Wigs, and Men Who’ve Never Been Told No
We know who did it before Alice does. The series opens on Catherine (Lola Petticrew, Dating Amber) already settled on a Halloween stoop mere feet away from a billionaire’s son she has just poisoned, telling him she loves his smile but not the noises he’s making as he gasps for air. Her method is seduction and her tools are masks and wigs. She builds a different face for every approach, offers her beauty and her undivided attention to men who have never once been told no, lets them believe they’ve won, and then collects.
From there, she works up a twisty ladder toward a high-profile family headed by a patriarch played by Peter McRobbie, with Hope Davis as his daughter. What Catherine is actually after, and why she chose these particular men, is the question the season keeps its hand over, and Meriwether is admirably stubborn about not answering it too early.
She isn’t subverting the genre so much as pressing on every trope until something gives. This is less Killing Eve than it is Homeland, because the destabilizing question was never whether the two women would meet. It’s whether the woman carrying the badge is the more dangerous person in the frame.
Voices Pitched to the Floor
Rossum is doing her most raw work since Shameless. Alice was shaped by years of abuse by a loved one and now finds herself seeking out a version of it from new partners in order to feel like herself, which is uglier and truer than the show had any obligation to go. Rossum also pitches her voice so far down that you half expect her vocal cords to come back up with part of her small intestine, and the hoarse croak makes sense: this is a woman who puts bad men away by day and asks strangers to rough her up at night.
When Alice goes hunting for those encounters, finding men online who want the same arrangement she does, her hair takes on the quality of a huge Jennifer Beals-in-Flashdance mane, and the image is relaying eighties dream-girl walking somewhere very dark. The show is clear about what put her on that road. It’s much less clear about why she keeps wandering down it, and I wanted more from that.
Petticrew is doing a similarly careful, deliberate performance, and I liked where Catherine lands, cool and calculating but permitted real flaws. However, getting there takes too long. The show teeter-totters on her interiority well past the point of productive mystery. Born in Northern Ireland, Petticrew’s American accent never fully arrives either, though it could be argued the ambiguity is another piece of the mystery surrounding the enigmatic Catherine.
Kirk Tightens the Screws
Technically this is slick, tight, and confident, with a procedural sheen that keeps peeling back to reveal something far worse underneath. Brian Kirk directed the first two episodes and sets a template the rest of the season honors. His résumé explains the discipline. He made 21 Bridges, the Chadwick Boseman thriller that seals off all of Manhattan for one night and then tightens it like a net, and Dead of Winter, in which Emma Thompson plays a Minnesota woman who blunders into a kidnapping and has to out-think two captors in the snow with almost nothing to work with. Both are patient, mean little suspense machines, and both understand that tension is mostly a matter of withholding. The same hand is on the valve here.
Cinematographers Doug Emmett and Brian Lannin split the season cleanly. Composer Ariel Marx keeps the score lean enough to let the performances carry the dread.
The Ensemble That Gels
Quincy Tyler Bernstine is giving an awards-worthy performance and one of the most unusual on television this year. Nora runs the FBI’s sex crimes unit out of a windowless room where she watches the worst footage in the building and drinks to get the images back out. Bernstine plays her without a single bid for your affection. She isn’t asking you to like Nora, she isn’t asking you to forgive her, and she seems entirely unbothered by whether you do either, which is a bold way to attack a role. She goes after it with something close to glee. Some of Nora’s boldest moves are pure self-preservation. Some are closer to absolution. I could never get out ahead of her, and that’s the compliment.
McNairy has been at this for decades and I don’t think he’s repeated himself once. Danny gets peeled back an episode at a time, and his scenes with Rossum have real friction to them. Steve Way is a genuine find as a man with MS whom Catherine cares for professionally and personally, playing comic relief and flatly refusing your pity in the same breath. Lacy bulked up for Marshall and is far less paint-by-numbers than the part suggests.
The deeper you go into the call sheet, the better it gets. Chloe Troast is doing a complete 180 from her single season as a featured player on Saturday Night Live, where she was demonstrably funny and somehow wasn’t asked back, and she’s excellent here in a register nobody would have predicted from that year.
Nobody does brittle like Davis and she’s afforded several scenes where she snaps and cracks like the best of them. Rob Yang is a treat as a kiss-up FBI agent, Alex Morf gets a brief and memorable turn as Alice’s interim boss, and Danny McCarthy plays Nora’s superior, a man with a connection to several players in this mystery that the show takes its sweet time revealing. Nobody coasts, and it all gels into an ensemble that belongs to one show, though I’ll admit I kept wanting to get back to Rossum’s half of the story often.
A Line the Show Won’t Draw
What Furious is really about isn’t the chase. It’s a survey of lives and souls damaged by what we’re willing to do to one another, and it’s hard to sit with. Nearly everyone here is unhappy, and the show stays with them all the way down. It keeps circling back to the cost of silence and to what happens when power outranks a person’s humanity.
One real stumble, and it’s worth spelling out, because it’s a common one. The show repeatedly folds sex work and sex trafficking into the same category, as though the distinction were a technicality. It isn’t. One describes adults choosing to sell a service; the other describes people being coerced, moved, and sold by somebody else.
Collapsing the two doesn’t just blur a plot point, it reproduces the exact logic that makes trafficking harder to fight, because treating every worker as a victim and every client as a predator pushes consenting adults away from police and toward the people most likely to exploit them. Advocates have been making that argument for decades. A series this attentive to the ways institutions fail women should have caught it, and Nora’s unit is precisely where that line ought to be drawn most sharply of all.
Weekly Through August 31
Otherwise it starts strong, spikes in the middle, and lands. The finale isn’t quite a jaw-dropper, and I don’t think it’s reaching for one. It does something rarer: it holds a sustained note at the end and lets it ring, the kind you can hear fading into a satisfying darkness if Hulu stops here, or opening into a new movement if a second season gets the greenlight. Either way it plays, and somebody was clearly thinking ahead.
Four of the eight episodes have aired, with the rest arriving weekly through August 31. Get in now, before somebody spoils it for you. Eight episodes, roughly eight hours, and every one of them tightens the valve on a scream that’s been building since the first scene. Be in the room when it finally gets loose.
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