Hulu’s Furious is one of the finest crime-drama series to emerge in decades. The story follows an FBI agent, Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), as she chases a mysterious female serial killer (Lola Petticrew) who targets wealthy, powerful men. Handpicked because they are part of a sex-trafficking ring, the female killer is out to avenge all victims in a cat-and-mouse dynamic with Alice.  

The show is not only about a teenage victim going on a scavenger hunt for those who wronged her or her relationship with her best friend when they were teenagers. The show is not about the rich controlling everything. It is about the upsetting fragmentation of institutional relationships, bureaucracy, and complicity at the hands of wealth, social status, and fear. 

Even if it were about Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie) and his loathsome empire of sex trafficking, there is a grim irony that his daughter was a victim. His wealth doesn’t merely buy luxury; it creates consequences in his own “la la land,” where he thinks he is untouchable. People like him exist in a system where they can protect their reputation, suppress information, intimidate victims, and exploit bureaucratic limitations, therefore making the murders so morally complicated. 

Though directed by multiple episodic directors, including Brian Kirk, Destiny Ekaragha, Karena Evans, and Cory Finley, the direction stood out for me as the story did not use violence for purely sensational purposes. It was used to expose each character’s psychology. The camera stays on the emotional states of the characters rather than the mechanics of the murder itself.

The two highlighted stories, both victims but standing on opposite sides of the river banks, give a contrast between those who operate within the law and those who operate outside it. The visual and thematic parallel between Catherine, the killer, and Alice is the direction’s crux, making those distinctions feel unstable. It seems as if their worlds are beginning to bleed into one another, and sometimes they feel sympathy for each other, reiterating that they are neither hunter nor hunted. 

Furious kicks in aptly, shifting tone from procedural investigation to psychological drama, dark comedy, social commentary, and outright savagery without letting the characters lose sight. From this tonal fluidity erupt branches of worldwide views. Nothing is entirely clean, and moments that could seem triumphant on the surface level might carry an undercurrent of dread.   

Emmy Rossum and Lola Petticrew are ‘categorically’ phenomenal. Rossum’s Alice is broken, hurt, and vulnerable even after escaping from a suffocating relationship, to a worrying extent that she is afraid of going into the shower, as this reminds her of the physical violence that her ex-boyfriend inflicted. She is a traumatized detective who suffers from repression, physical unease, and self-destructive impulses, and the gradual realization that the boundary between Alice and Catherine is dangerously porous. 

Her blazing performance dawns on us as a confrontation with a version of herself who has begun to wonder what exists on the other side of the story, rather than simply hunting a killer who crossed the moral line. By the finale, Alice succumbs to her own victimization, and Rossum makes the moment feel less like a shockingly chaotic transformation and more like a controlled culmination of everything she has been suppressing for years. 

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and this was probably the case with Alice when Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) asks her to watch the sensitive video named “Alice” on the flash drive. She cried but got herself back together, most likely, for the next mission, and this is exactly the powerful lesson I like to take from the show. 

On the other hand, Petticrew’s Catherine was remarkably compelling as well as increasingly disturbing. For her, killing becomes a source of psychological empowerment in itself as the season progresses. Her victims’ final moments give her a sense of absolute control as she becomes a godlike being in deciding who lives and who dies. It looks as if she is consuming the power of those who once consumed her and her friend, brutally. A victim who enjoys becoming the predator. 

Catherine’s declaration of killing as some unrivaled “power” in the world takes me back to Manhunter (1986), where Hannibal Lecter (Brian Cox) explains to Will Graham (William Petersen) that killers get an overwhelming power from killing, saying “If one does what God does enough times, one will become as God.” This is the precise feeling once again seen in Furious, where Catherine, not only to fulfill her revenge, also likes to “watch someone die since there’s one moment right before they go when you’re not scared at all. When I’m killing someone, it’s like I’m eating him. Like I’m swallowing him…and I have all the f***ing power in the world.” 

It is one of those rare series where virtually every performer seems to understand their assignment like a pro. There isn’t any weak link hiding beneath their towering performances, which include Scoot McNairy bringing in a beautifully worn-in humanity to Danny Kelly, Quincy’s Nora Washington with a perfect equilibrium between caustic humor, professional exhaustion, and buried trauma of handling humanity’s darkest corners, and Steve Way’s Alden with supreme warmth and comic vitality. 

Thank God! Furious is renewed for Season 2, as per Deadline, and I cannot get enough of these damaged yet ferocious characters. I want to see what more they could bring to the table. Whether the story picks up directly from the devastating events of the finale or opens an entirely new chapter, it will be exciting to see how far Furious is willing to go.

Review Courtesy of Madiha Ali

Feature Image Credit to Hulu