Furious: this serial killer thriller is the most staggeringly feminist TV you’ll ever watch
A male friend recently attended a Lily Allen show, and shakily described the experience to me. “I felt like a vegetarian fox at an armed chicken convention,” he said. An overwhelmingly female crowd were experiencing powerful catharsis, united in their anger at men and joy of bangers. I told him chickens couldn’t handle firearms, but I don’t think he heard me. He had tinnitus from the screaming.
There isn’t much screaming in Furious, Disney+’s new detective series (from Monday, 27 July). Also missing are the standard tropes of murder dramas: mutilated female bodies, an absence of women’s agency generally. Furious is the cat and mouse story between junior FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) and Catherine (Lola Petticrew), a serial killer who is bumping off male victims with calculated sadism. Catherine might be the least serial killer name imaginable, but that’s just one way this show rewrites the rule book. I’d say it’s the most feminist show I’ve ever seen – except that might lead some to write it off.
The show’s ethos goes beyond having female leads. You can see it in the way Black and her FBI sex-crimes squad mentor Nora, played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine, interview victims. The clues and tells they notice, their knowledge of a system that fails women. Grimly fitted to Epstein-aware times, the show is interested in the way wealthy men buy legal immunity. Trafficking charges are hard to make stick, notes Nora, thanks to the vulnerability of female witnesses. “Once you accept money for sex, you are a criminal.”
Injustice does not sit solely on the upper rungs of the social ladder. Black is forced to work the case alongside an abusive ex-partner from the NYPD. She never made a formal complaint against him, choosing to simply leave her police job. He’s brilliantly played by Jake Lacy, an actor I feel for. There’s something about his handsome, preppy face, instantly hateable in The White Lotus, that suits villainy. Something that screams “bro” louder than a reunion at a rowing club. Something about it that makes you think: “I want someone to punch you.” Can’t be easy.
This isn’t a punching show, though. It’s more sophisticated, more weary. There is sisterhood, but it’s fraught. Black and Catherine share traumatic pasts; only one of them skilfully manipulates women and men alike to work through a kill list. Black chooses to swallow her PTSD, emotionally cauterising herself. Nora is jaded by decades of working in the dark. As part of her job, she has to watch child sexual abuse images, which she does in a locked room she compares to the entrance of Hades. “Why do you want to work in the basement on sex crimes, and crimes against children? Do you hate yourself?” she asks Black at their first meeting.
In the half of the series I’ve watched, there are perhaps two men who aren’t at best chauvinists, and often coercive hypocrites. People might grumble about this. But it seems fair enough, given TV’s history of female representation. Plus you can’t critique a patriarchy-omelette without breaking some legs. I mean eggs. There’s no such thing as a vegetarian fox.
One of the few nice ones is Black’s former partner Danny, played by Scoot McNairy. (He’s a work partner, not the violent romantic partner. The NYPD here clearly employ a good cop, bad cop, bad cop, bad cop strategy.) Danny believed Black’s story of domestic abuse and spoke out. His allyship has cost him the support of his male colleagues. Yet in an excruciating scene, we learn that Black has also stopped speaking to Danny; he reminds her of the past, her need to be rescued. This is a rare crime show equally interested in the psychology of victimhood as killing, and which values nuance and complexity over catharsis.
Furious acknowledges its dark attraction to the damaged Catherine, whom Nora describes as “our avenging angel, our evil Fury, our murderess”, as she enacts a justice that otherwise never comes. Is it Catherine’s fury to which the show’s title refers? Nora herself, or Black? The childish anger of its weak men? Almost certainly, it speaks to its female audience. For fans of Killing Eve, Promising Young Woman and Lily Allen, it’s a must-see. I’m less sure if men will watch. Even the good ones, who know they should.