Messy, clever and can barely conceal its rage: is Furious the most outstanding TV show of the year?
The story of a serial killer taking revenge on the rich predatory men who abused her just earned a fantastic finale. With career-defining acting, daring Epstein parallels and super dark comedy, it’s a total must-watch
You could easily watch the first few minutes of Furious without knowing that it would turn out to be so special. It opens with a scene of pure horror: it’s Halloween night and a real monster is hiding among the pretend ones. A woman we come to know as Catherine Grace (an astonishingly good Lola Petticrew) is inside a man’s house, wearing a creepy kitten mask. The man is in bad shape, crawling on the floor, gasping for air and begging for his life. Catherine is alternately chirpy and tender with him, but eventually, she loses her patience with his pleading. She takes a syringe filled with fentanyl out of a pencil case decorated with sparkly stickers and jewels and finishes the job.
So far, so creepy crime drama, but Furious is already hiding in plain sight, because the monster is not who we think it is. What looks as if it will be a cat-and-mouse story, in which a tenacious FBI agent hunts a twisted serial killer, quickly rips up any expectations. We learn that Catherine was trafficked into sex work as a teenager, and is now making her way through a kill list of predatory and powerful men. Her life has been shaped by a conspiracy of abuse, violence, neglect and indifference. She has decided to take matters into her own broken hands.
The case finds its way to the desk of Alice Black (Emmy Rossum, in the role of her life), a tough former NYPD homicide detective turned recent FBI recruit. Her boss, Nora Washington (an equally excellent Quincy Tyler Bernstine), is the head of the sex crimes and crimes against children unit. She drinks to cope with the horrors she has to witness on a daily basis and is in possession of the darkest sense of humour on TV. She sees the potential, and pain, in Alice, and puts her to work. But as the series progresses, we see what it demands of them both to pursue justice, when they are repeatedly told to step back and stand down.
It is hard to think of a recent drama that has placed quite so much trust in the intelligence of its audience. Every character here is flawed. It has moral ambiguity baked into its core. Alice left the NYPD after being beaten by her cop ex-boyfriend Marshall Connelly (a truly sinister Jake Lacy). She has been ostracised by most of their former colleagues, who either do not believe her or, more likely, do not care. She is suffering from a complex response to trauma, and Furious does not shy away from depicting those complexities. It is a raw and unusually vivid portrait of women and PTSD.
When Alice begins to investigate Catherine and her crimes, Furious becomes a big, bold examination of justice, and what that might look like for women who have no access to it. It can barely conceal its rage, and by the final episode, few would expect it to. Catherine, and countless other young girls like her, have had their lives stolen and destroyed by men who believed themselves to be invincible. “I didn’t get to decide a fucking thing about my life,” she shouts, in one of the series’ most devastating scenes.
There is an obvious timeliness to this story, which may be one of the reasons why it is capable of landing such a blow. The Epstein parallels are not subtle, nor are they intended to be. The rich buy people off to cover up their terrible deeds. They operate in plain sight, daring people to catch them. There is an important photograph of trafficked teenage girls with older, wealthy men. One can only imagine if this show will pop up on the Mountbatten-Windsor streaming queue.
But what Furious provides is a fantasy of power, reclaimed and repurposed for the women who have had it taken away from them, if they ever had it at all. One cop describes Catherine as “five feet tall with her fuckin’ socks on”; that she can overpower her victims is something of a fantasy in itself. The finale has a near-impossible task in that it needs to maintain the bleak spirit of the story, while offering some sort of relief, or reward, for the women we have come to care so much about. It pulls it off by allowing for some magical thinking, while never veering too far from the grim reality of the situation. Some men pay for what they have done, whether formally or off the books. Some are given medals for their criminal behaviour. As messy as it is, the resolution is satisfying enough. Justice was never going to be clean.
Furious is a clever show. It works as a straightforward thriller, gripping and tense, using a murder mystery and a manhunt to expose an institutional conspiracy. It is also an emotionally astute act of catharsis, and this fantasy of revenge can feel, at times, like a much-needed balm. It has been renewed for a second season already. No wonder. It is one of the year’s most outstanding shows, and, after all, there are plenty more monsters out there.
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