Furious TV review: Serial killer crime thriller taps into women’s righteous anger

A serial killer and the detective doggedly pursuing them? Being there, done that, a thousand times over.

But the new offering from writer Elizabeth Meriwether, Furious rises above its genre shackles, and is a surprisingly great series that actually makes you sit up and take notice.

Furious is neither relentlessly dark and grim like most of its crime thriller contemporaries, nor is it trying too hard to be quirky, as seen in the likes of The Flight Attendant. This is well-made TV that understands how to place something within its genre without being trapped by the tropes.

It also commits to the one thing that TV should do better than film but often fails at: characters. Furious builds out its ensemble, and elevates most of its characters beyond the archetypes they represent.

They have shading, they have quirks and they have interiority – they’re not just functionaries of the plot.

Furious is very, very, very loosely inspired by the 1987 Debra Winger film Black Widow, about a woman who marries rich men and then dispatches them, and the female cop hunting her down.

The legacy of the film is only in so far as the killer in Furious is also a woman, played by Say Nothing’s Lola Petticrew, and Shameless’s Emmy Rossum portrays the FBI agent on the case.

Petticrew’s Catherine has no interest in money. Her motivation is something more “righteous”, and reflects the title of the show.

Catherine’s targets are men who were involved in a child sex trafficking ring, in which she was caught, abused and raped when she was 15. Her need for vengeance and a form of justice is what drives her.

The character is cold and wily, but Furious is able to position Catherine as both villain and victim, and interrogates the fluidity between those two concepts.

Furious is interested in how trauma changes and shapes people. Catherine is in something of a state of arrested development, with predilections for the shiny things that teenage girls like, dated to the moment when her childhood was stolen from her by lascivious men.

Her opposite in the game is Alice Black, a former NYPD cop and now junior FBI agent whose professional career and personal life was derailed by Marshall (Jake Lacy), her former domestic partner, also a cop, whose beatings landed her in the hospital.

When she went public, no one believed her and the whole department shunned her, except for Danny (Scoot McNairy), who was also ostracised for standing by his partner.

Alice is also angry – at Marshall, at the police department, at all the people in her life who didn’t believe her – but she tries to repress it, which means it manifests in other ways.

Then there’s Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), the FBI agent in charge of the sex crimes unit who spends her days sifting through child pornography, barely concealing her day drinking. Nora too is mad, at all the systems in place that kept her, a Black woman, from advancing despite being better than her male colleagues.

And at all the microaggressions that makes it obvious that there’s a deep, ingrained culture of disrespect. It’s the fact the sex crimes unit is relegated to the basement, or the male agent who insists on referring to teenage sex trafficking victims as “former prostitutes”. You can feel that seething fury jumping off the screen.

Furious is, for the most part, not didactic. It’s not hiding its perspective – Nora tells Alice about the story of Medusa being punished for being raped by Poseidon, and sets the show’s theme - but it’s woven organically through the storytelling and the character beats.

Meriwether’s first Hollywood credits (she was previously a playwright) were the rom-com series New Girl and movie No Strings Attached, but in more recent years, with The Dropout and Dying for Sex, she moved into projects that are tonally different.

But what unites her work is this deep understanding of the female voice, whether they’re tech scammers, a terminal cancer patient looking to expand her sexual horizons or the “adorkable” teacher Jess Day.

That voice is present in Furious, which gives its three female leads grounding in a genre that often marginalise their stories.

Furious is streaming on Disney+