“Furious” Is a Crime Drama for a Post-Epstein World
The first episode of “Furious” ends with a date from hell. It’s a late night in Manhattan, and Oliver (Rob Delaney) is a wealthy, middle-aged lawyer and a walking assemblage of red flags. Between lines of coke, he yammers on to Catherine (Lola Petticrew), the young server he’s just picked up, about how his ex-wife’s incessant chatter led to the end of their marriage, and how she should’ve made more allowances for his sex addiction. When Catherine leans in to kiss him, he presents her with an N.D.A. It’s a relief to know that the only reason this tiny, sharp-eyed woman is putting up with his nonsense is that she plans to kill him. Even when forcibly injecting him with fentanyl, she’s the more sympathetic figure: their first sexual encounter, she explains, took place years ago, when she was a fifteen-year-old trafficking victim. Catherine remembers that he brought her a glass of water afterward, so she returns the favor, offering him a few sips. Just before finishing him off, she coaxes him to repeat a phrase that helped her endure: “I’m not here.”
Catherine’s homicidal pursuit of the men involved in the most calamitous night of her life composes one half of the new Hulu crime drama; the other half traces the investigation into the murders by two female F.B.I. agents, who gradually realize that the dead men are connected via a pedophilic network. Alice (Emmy Rossum), an N.Y.P.D. detective turned Bureau rookie, and Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), a veteran of the sex-crimes unit, recognize the case for the career-maker it could be. Eager as the women are to nab a serial killer, going after the network’s Epstein-like billionaire ringleader proves even more tempting. Having spent decades watching powerful men evade justice, Nora is doubly determined to bring this one down, and regards Catherine’s vigilantism as an obstacle to a larger victory. But, given the slow pace and compromised priorities of the legal system, there are limits to what the agents can accomplish within the Bureau’s bounds.
“Furious,” which débuted this week, initially recalls the 2019 Netflix miniseries “Unbelievable,” about two female detectives’ extraordinary efforts to catch a serial rapist. Based on real-life events, “Unbelievable” depicts a male-dominated police force in which indifference to, if not outright hostility toward, survivors of sexual assault enables a predator to find more victims. The new series, too, features a law-enforcement culture where disinterest in gendered violence is the norm, and cops knowingly patronize establishments that traffic underage girls. But in “Furious,” unlike its predecessor, the grim subject matter isn’t accompanied by respectful solemnity—nor are Alice and Nora beacons of benevolence, like the heroine of “Mare of Easttown,” a policewoman who serves as a de-facto social worker for the struggling members of her town. After a conventional start, “Furious” comes to feel alive and delightfully contradictory: at once cerebral and pulpy, compassionate and unhinged. Catherine’s story line evokes a feverish what-if scenario in which a survivor musters the requisite recklessness, talent for murder, and wig collection to mete out retribution. The season is streaked with mordant humor, and the show’s greatest achievement is its balance of genre-savvy thrills and seriousness of purpose.
The tonal volatility complements the show’s central theme: that survival is inevitably messy. This empathetic impulse is a signature of “Furious” ’s creator, Elizabeth Meriwether, who’s established herself as a TV auteur to follow. Still best known for the Zooey Deschanel sitcom “New Girl,” which aired from 2011 to 2018, Meriwether has since pivoted to darker fare. “The Dropout,” her 2022 miniseries about the biotech scammer Elizabeth Holmes, and “Dying for Sex,” last year’s dramedy about a Stage IV cancer patient’s final journey of sensual soul-searching, were both shows about real-life women driven by unusual wants, with scripts that reflected Meriwether’s diligent research and interest in procedure. Her tendency toward didacticism lent “Dying for Sex” a clinical quality, but it’s a welcome feature in “Furious,” where the exposition shines a necessary light on a murky world. Nora instructs Alice in why so many trafficking cases fall apart, how to interrogate young people with shock-induced memory gaps, and why it’s sometimes worth it, prosecutorially speaking, to threaten a teen-age victim with legal consequences. (That teen, Nora says, may already be recruiting other vulnerable girls into the sex trade, if only to lighten her own workload.) To fully humanize survivors, the series contends, it’s necessary to resist the assumption that suffering confers goodness.
“Furious” sometimes risks overstating its argument: Nora’s musings that “victims of violence are the most violent” and that “being a victim just makes you colder, more calculating” can feel pitiless, even when describing a serial killer. But those observations are more compelling when applied to Alice, a former teen-age runaway who, in another life, might have ended up where Catherine is now. Alice is the show’s emotional center of gravity, and her relationships with the rest of the ensemble are suitably nuanced. Though the reappearance of her abusive ex-boyfriend, Marshall (Jake Lacy), triggers symptoms of P.T.S.D., her gratitude toward his mother, who helped raise her, is deep-rooted enough that she attempts a reconciliation of sorts. Marshall’s presence also complicates Alice’s will-they, won’t-they dynamic with her old partner on the force, Danny (Scoot McNairy), a sensitive outlier within the N.Y.P.D. who nurses her back to functionality. (Meriwether’s knack for crafting rumpled, swoon-worthy male love interests may be the biggest carryover from her “New Girl” days.) But the heart of the series is the tentative alliance between Alice and Nora, who are drawn to each other even as they’re acutely aware of the other’s shortcomings. Alice craves mentorship but can’t help noting how often Nora drinks on the job; Nora, who discovers Alice having a panic attack in the bathroom, wonders whether the newbie stands a chance of making it in the Bureau. Both have found ways of coping within misogynistic institutions that have actively sidelined them. But they truly bond as survivors who can acknowledge the unexpected forms desire and resilience can take. On an after-hours drive, a visibly bruised Alice confesses to Nora that she asks her hookups to strike her. To her surprise, Nora is unruffled. “You think I’ve never asked someone to smack me around a little in the throes of a passionate embrace?” the older woman asks. “You think I’ve never let someone take a few whacks at this piñata?”
The show is less successful at fleshing out its killer, who too often comes across as a cinematic contrivance: a sexy-creepy seductress with trauma-prompted mood swings and selective, narratively convenient amnesia about the night that haunts her. Even in her character’s hokiest moments—as when she recites a nursery rhyme to Oliver’s sleeping form—Petticrew is a mesmerizing presence, moving fluidly between übercompetent steeliness and self-doubting softness. But Catherine’s essential loneliness makes her difficult to know; she seldom lets the mask fall, and her sense of self is riddled with holes. When she finally finds a confidant, she says, with heartbreaking casualness, “My memory sucks. It’s ’cause I got strangled so much.”
Given the circumstances, it becomes hard not to root against Alice and Nora’s efforts to arrest the billionaire—far more satisfying to see him dead by Catherine’s hand. But, if Catherine can feel like a cipher, the dramatization of the criminal coterie she pursues is genuinely persuasive. Far from the chumminess on display in the Epstein files, her targets express fear of and even disdain for one another. Each man has seemingly convinced himself that, whatever his flaws, he’s not the group’s most depraved member. Catherine doesn’t discriminate between direct perpetrators and silent bystanders, but her totalizing quest reveals a more subtle truth: there are many ways to be complicit. ♦