Furious review – a proper grownup thriller that’s powered by sheer female rage

Furious is well named. It is powered throughout its eight-episode run by an unfaltering current of female rage. It is the creation of Elizabeth Meriwether, who gave us last year’s astonishing Dying for Sex (starring Michelle Williams as a woman with terminal cancer discovering the range and depth of her sexuality for the first time) and 2022’s brisk, brilliant The Dropout (the tale of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of blood-testing company, Theranos). They were both based on true stories. Furious was apparently inspired by the 1987 film Black Widow, starring Theresa Russell and Debra Winger, but it has jettisoned the marry-and-murder-for-money plot and contemporised the rest so thoroughly that the result hardly seems to merit the dutiful hat-tip the publicity has given it.

Meriwether is the writer of the first three episodes, the rest are divided among four women and one man. The drama itself is dominated by three complicated and fascinating female characters, played by Emmy Rossum, Lola Petticrew (who gave an extraordinary performance in 2024’s Say Nothing) and Quincy Tyler Bernstine. A fantastic supporting cast and a dense, lean, evocative script make this television for grownups, television to pay attention to and to entertain you enormously.

Furious opens with a man crawling across an apartment floor. A tiny, childlike woman (Petticrew) in a Halloween cat mask watches him as she gathers sweets for a child at the door. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she says. Candy corn dispensed, she returns just as he has made it to the stairs. She injects him with something and lies down next to him to watch him die. We eventually learn that her name is Catherine.

Rossum plays Alice Black, a former NYPD officer who left the force after her childhood sweetheart-turned-fellow-cop-boyfriend-turned-violent-drunk assaulted her so badly that she was hospitalised. When she reported him to their lieutenant, virtually the whole department turned against her. Now she is manning the FBI tip line while she waits for a spot to open up for her in the sex crimes unit.

She gets a call from her one remaining friend, Danny Kelly (Scoot McNairy) – who has suffered the consequences for supporting her - at her old job. He needs her help investigating the case of the body on the stairs. The body is that of Caleb Easton, scion of local billionaire Jay Easton, and it is clear that his apparent overdose was staged. Alice notices similarities with an old case and, as further clues and bodies accrue, the detectives conclude that they are on the hunt for that rare thing – a female serial killer.

Alice uses this as an in with the sex crimes unit boss, Nora Washington (Bernstine), who becomes a sort of unofficial mentor to the new FBI agent, in part as an act of self-salvation. What follows is partly a standard thriller, as they discover a sex trafficking ring implicating the great and the good who have been helping themselves to young women and children with impunity for years. But it’s also a Killing Eve-like cat and mouse game between a detective who, against her better instincts, is gradually coming to bond with her quarry. And, not least, it’s a character drama that explores the different ways in which reactions to similar traumas can manifest themselves.

There are plenty of harrowing scenes, but not the ones you would expect. There is no lingering on the murders. There is little gore. But there is an early moment – not much more than a look, really – between Alice and her sister at the latter’s hen party that speaks to a heartbreakingly unbridgeable chasm between them. There is an awful, shocking scene when one of the few people Alice loves and trusts suddenly turns screamingly against her. And a quietly magnificent, quietly terrible scene by a hospital bed involving a monologue from Nora that distills the revulsions and the bone-deep despair of her years spent watching children being abused and “never, never” really being able to make a difference to the amount of evil in the world. “You think you’re ever going to catch anyone who matters?” she says to Alice. It is rhetorical and Alice knows better than to answer.

With Furious, I think we might be seeing the birth of a new subgenre of television drama; call it the Epstein thriller. Pre-him, the files and revelations about the depth and breadth of his network of suppliers, enablers and willing (rich, male) participants, we might have thought the plot of Furious preposterous, sitting uneasily with the series’ grimly realistic tone and emotional palette. Now it is an organic, seamless, horrifying whole that asks how individuals survive such predators and how society survives such knowledge. And when we are going to become furious enough to do something to make a difference.

• Furious is on Disney+