A show about buried rage

Furious, which finished on Hulu in late August, centers on three women consumed by anger at their abusers. The camera lingers on their eyes to show the incandescent fury that drives them forward.

Alice Black's impossible choice

FBI agent Alice Black, played by Emmy Rossum, was beaten by her ex-boyfriend, a fellow cop. She reported him to the NYPD but was disbelieved and abandoned by the department.

Nora's silent betrayal

Nora Washington heads the Sex Crimes Unit at the FBI. She stares in stony silence as her boss and betrayer Ed George lectures her about self-care while she processes years of institutional failure.

Catherine's masked vengeance

Catherine Grace was sexually assaulted as a trafficked teenager over a decade ago. Now she wears literal and figurative masks as she transforms her victimhood into revenge against her tormentors.

Created by Elizabeth Meriwether

The show was created by Elizabeth Meriwether, who also created New Girl and The Dropout. She designed it as a fictional catharsis for the ways misogyny runs rampant in real society.

Anger in the Trump era

The show arrives as an adjudicated sexual abuser runs the country and appoints another man accused of sexual assault to a cabinet position. The gains of the Me Too movement have become mere embers.

Epstein's unfinished reckoning

Women abused by Jeffrey Epstein and his associates cannot get real redress. The haphazard release of millions of documents further traumatizes them. That well of anger has to go somewhere.

Catherine at the Halloween parade

Viewers first meet Catherine at a neighborhood Halloween parade wearing a red wig and animal mask. Inside the house behind her, a drugged man is about to be killed with a fentanyl-laced needle.

Many masks, many roles

Catherine wears surgical masks to evade surveillance cameras and for her job as a home health aide. She also channels her trauma into roles as a domestic abuse survivor, cater waiter, and flirtatious submissive.

Petticrew walks the line

Lola Petticrew's performance as Catherine tips between sanity and madness. She channels the mythical Furies, transforming victimhood into vengeance, willing to risk death because living has cost too much.

Alice joins the maelstrom

Alice is enlisted to investigate the murder of Caleb, son of billionaire Jay Easton, whose sexual proclivities have long been whispered about but never proven. She becomes consumed by the case.

Competence as a carapace

Alice's scary competence as an investigator and her violent sexual encounters are a cover for her own howling hurt. Her desire for revenge finally breaks through.

Rooted in 1980s noir

Furious is loosely based on the 1987 film Black Widow, written by Ronald Bass. But where that film focused on erotic tension, Meriwether's vision focuses on trauma kinship between her main leads.

Visual echoes of 1990s cinema

Petticrew resembles Mena Suvari in American Beauty. Rossum resembles Debra Winger in Black Widow and Julia Roberts in Sleeping With the Enemy, another Bass film about intimate partner violence.

Real horrors inspire season two

Furious has been picked up for a second season. This summer, Philadelphia police found over one million images and videos in a house linked to pornographer R.C. Horsch and evidence of at least seven missing women.

Catharsis into action

Epstein and R.C. Horsch evaded accountability in life, but television dramas like Furious help us know them for who they really were. After watching, the reviewer felt her rage channeled into action rather than despair.

“Catharsis isn't a solution, and television isn't life, but after watching the series, I felt my own rage channeled into action rather than despair.”