In the first episode of Hulu’s mesmerizing new detective series, Furious, Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), the head of the FBI’s sex crimes unit, relates the story of Medusa to a young agent. The monster with snakes for hair who can turn men to stone with a glance, Medusa was not always that way. Medusa was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, and Athena, deeming this Medusa’s fault, transformed her into the monster we know. It’s an apt tale to serve as prologue to a detective series about a female serial killer tracking down all the men who’ve wronged her, but it also resonates with the women who are hunting her. “Victims of violence are the most violent,” Nora says. “Don’t you think so?”
Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), the young agent listening to Nora’s story, was formerly a Brooklyn homicide detective in an abusive relationship with Marshall (Jake Lacy), a colleague in the precinct and her childhood sweetheart. On one occasion, he beat her so badly she ended up in the hospital. She told her commanding officer, and rumors spread, but the department did not reprimand or discipline Marshall; instead Alice was shunned as disloyal, as a liar. Doubly traumatized by the abuse and by the department’s rejection of her, Alice has started a new life as a fed, aspiring to become an agent for the sex crimes unit.
When she and Marshall cross paths on a case—they’re working a PD-FBI collaboration on a string of murders—he is apologetic, cowed, even meek in his interactions with her. He invites her to come see his sick mother. He seems, to all outward appearances, like a good guy. She agrees, but the sentimental scene quickly turns sour. His mother berates Alice for lying to try to ruin her son’s career, and Alice storms to the door. “She just wants to know that I’m gonna be okay,” Marshall pleads in the soft, chastened tones we’ve come to expect from him, “and she wants you to know that I’ve changed.” Alice, enraged, replies, “You changed things? What’d you change? You got a new coat? What? You got new pants? New haircut?”
And then Marshall really does change. “Please stop for a second,” he whisper-shouts. His hands raise to the sides of his head, his fingers tensed, grabbing air. “Stop making jokes!” Things unravel from there, Marshall’s pretense of friendly détente vanishes, he chases her, she pulls a gun on him. He tried to play it cool, but in that moment, Alice saw, and we saw, the truth. He wanted to hit her. Furious, one of the best new shows of the year, is about what it’s like to be one of the women who make men like Marshall so angry. And what kind of rage lies in them.
Furious, created by Elizabeth Meriwether, is about the systems through which men abuse women and girls, as well as the systems through which they get away with it. Sometimes those systems are occult bureaucracies and complicated conspiracies, but often, we see, there’s really no system at all but the patriarchy. The villainous men of this show—domestic abusers, biased bosses, sex traffickers, dirty lawyers—get away with their crimes by being bold enough to commit them in the first place, and they rely on the reflexive fear or complacency or even sympathy of their witnesses to protect them. It’s a world in which it’s perfectly natural for a man’s desires and impulses to put him afoul of the law, but unnatural for a woman to try to hold him accountable.
At the center of the show, though, are three women who are ready to try. There’s Alice, abused, brilliant, but struggling through both her PTSD and the stigma she still carries, even at a new agency, to be taken seriously. There’s Nora, her reluctant mentor, whose career has been held back by workplace sexism, workplace racism, and the aforementioned systems that prevent her from ever really truly getting to the bad guys. “You think you’re ever gonna catch anyone who matters,” she asks Alice, by way of welcoming her to the profession.
Alice and Nora find each other in pursuit of a third wronged woman. In the show’s opening scenes, we see a man—an heir to the wealthy Easton family—obviously drugged and hurt, desperately crawling through his hallway. He is quickly subdued by a diminutive, even cheery, young woman with violent bangs and a sequined shoulder bag. As he lays in agony on his staircase, she injects him with what we eventually learn is a fatal dose of fentanyl. But she snuggles up beside him as he breathes his last. Gazing into his eyes, her brow furrows. “I don’t really like listening to you,” she confides to him, and then his eyes glaze over.
As Alice quickly surmises, Easton’s murder is not an isolated event. He is, instead, the second in what will soon be a line of men, all killed in the same way by the same woman. That emergent serial killer is Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew). She was trafficked as a child, raped and abused by countless men, and now, she’s methodically wiping out her abusers, specifically the ones she thinks are connected to the death of her childhood friend. We spend as much time onscreen with her as we do our law enforcement leads, and one of the show’s most obvious, but most subtly performed tricks, is getting us to understand the three of them as allies, despite their cat-and-mouse antagonism. Neither Alice nor Nora represents or even ever fully wields the power of their institutions; Catherine is never the real villain.
Furious is the third show Elizabeth Meriwether has created in the past four years, following 2022’s The Dropout and 2025’s Dying for Sex. All three series, to start, are ten times funnier than they have any right to be. For as ghastly as Furious can be, it’s filled with actors who have intuitive comic timing, and characters who make each other laugh. When Alice admits to Nora that she hooks up with men and asks them to get violent with her, Nora says, “You think I’ve never asked someone to smack me around a little in the throes of a passionate embrace? You think I’ve never let someone take a few whacks at this piñata?” Both of them laugh. The fifth episode of the show—alternating between Alice’s tense undercover operation and Danny’s slapstick interrogation of Catherine’s friend and possible fiancé Alden—is equal parts Silence of the Lambs and The Pink Panther. When Danny tells Alden that he suspects Catherine may have murdered his mother, Alden replies, “Nobody’s perfect.”
Furious also shares with The Dropout and Dying for Sex a common focus on the unruly, even contradictory feelings of underestimated women. And, in that, it is committed to a patient and unwavering focus on the texture of their experience. Nora sings Meat Loaf at karaoke; Catherine preps for murder by bedazzling pictures of her victims and dancing around in her room to Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” The shows are not just about what happens to these women, but what it feels like, how it happens to them as particular, eccentric individuals. Each series is an improvised dance between these women in extremis and the faceless institutions—Silicon Valley, the health care industry, the justice system—to which they are either invisible or a nuisance.
None of that would matter, though, if Meriwether didn’t have the genius for casting that she has. Amanda Seyfried, Michelle Williams, and Jenny Slate have all delivered career-best performances under her care. In Furious, there is, likewise, an embarrassment of riches: prestige TV veteran Emmy Rossum, stage actor and award-winning audiobook narrator Quincy Tyler Bernstine, and ferocious up-and-coming Irish actor Lola Petticrew. Each performance is so tenderly crafted and full of life—not one of these actors takes the available route of stoic gloom, the path of any number of raincoat-bedecked traumatized detectives and murderers before them. Abuse, violence, inequity have made these women strange, unpredictable, unable to play along and conform to the world around them. And that makes them spellbinding to watch onscreen—three weird sisters.
Furious is about the inescapability of bad guys and the labor the women—and decent men—around them have to perform in order to counterbalance or even appease them. It’s not enough that they’re there, it’s that they need things from the people they are most likely to abuse or exploit. A recurring theme of the series is men asking our three heroines things that make them uncomfortable. Nora’s supervisor asks her to drop a case to protect a powerful friend; Marshall asks Alice to call the lieutenant and tell him that the abuse allegations are lies; Marshall asks Alice to get back together; as she’s seducing one of her targets, he asks Catherine to sign an NDA. Even the “good” guys can’t help it: Both Alice and Catherine receive lovelorn proposals from their male friends (Scoot McNairy and Steve Way, respectively) at, or near, their lowest moments. Malevolent, dismissive, oblivious.
The obvious comparison for Furious is Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve, another series about a fucked-up female friendship plot between a cop and a murderer. But Furious is not a violent romance between two women on opposite sides of the law. The comparison that feels more apt is The Wire. Both shows are interested in the ways all parties concerned are caught up in the hypocrisy of a law enforcement bureaucracy that can’t—or perhaps is not even designed to—enforce the law. Both live inside that structural disappointment. Alice and Nora work quickly and competently to solve their case but are stymied by buffoonishness and corruption at every turn; Catherine knows that becoming a serial killer is the only way for her to extract justice for herself or her friend. Good intentions are the decadent luxury of the few agents who aren’t primarily concerned with covering their own asses—it’s easy to see why Alice and Nora might find kinship with Catherine, another woman whose intentions and interiority don’t matter in even the slightest bit to those with power over them. It is, to say the least, infuriating.
