FBI Agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) comes to realise that a murder she’s investigating is connected to a previous case. Seeking justice, her life becomes intertwined with the woman responsible, a calculating young serial killer named Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew) who targets wealthy men who abuse women.
Streaming on: Disney+
Episodes viewed: 5 of 8
Furious — based loosely on the 1987 thriller Black Widow — is not the detective show you think it is. Just as its complicated hero draws parallels between murders old and new, showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether connects the dots between crime dramas past and present, prestige or otherwise, deconstructing classic tropes. The results are as thoughtful as they are riveting.
The story begins with the brutal murder of a billionaire’s son, who takes his last breath while kids play outside in their Halloween costumes. We next meet down-and-out police detective-turned-FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), dismissed by pretty much everyone around her, even when she’s the only one to smell that a serial killer is involved. As the hunt unfolds, it becomes evident that Black and her suspect, Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew), share more in common than either of them expect.
If this sounds generic, that’s very much the point. Furious eases you in with the trappings of a more conventional thriller before gradually introducing far weightier subject matter. “Women are supposed to be hit and raped and go away and die quietly,” Black’s new supervisor, Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), notes early on. It’s in fascinating conversations between these two agents where Furious grapples most with victimhood, and how women are expected to act in the face of abuse.
Crafts a story that’s just as pulpy as it is cerebral.
Meriwether doesn’t rip up the crime-drama playbook completely. Rather than avoid clichés of the genre, Furious wields them with precision, crafting a story that’s just as pulpy as it is cerebral, in ways that make the genre feel fresh. Such complexity is matched by stellar performances throughout, from Rossum’s haunted husk of a lead to Petticrew’s eerily childlike killer. Bernstine is the true breakout though, deliberately off-kilter as the burned-out head of the FBI’s sex crimes unit.
Together, with their very different approaches, this trio reject the limited playbook that society affords women, and in doing so, asks us to reconsider how their stories are shaped on and off screen. That Furious does this while being more entertaining than any other crime show this year is hugely impressive.
Compelling and defiantly complex, Furious shifts the crime genre into vital new territory, reframing the scope and potential of crime dramas in their approach to female victimhood.
