Gripping and relevant with a high squirm-count, serial killer thriller “Furious” tells a tough story with intense commitment. But it can get tripped up by some questionable good intentions.
Immensely watchable despite any missteps, this series from the estimable Elizabeth Meriwether (“The Dropout,” “Dying for Sex”) shocks and saddens on the regular. Contemporized from the 1987 mystery “Black Widow,” “Furious” jettisons the movie’s tired, marry-and-murder-for-money plot for motives as timeless as humankind and urgent as the next Attorney General confirmation hearing.
Three superb and, well, furious performances drive the narrative through intriguing twists, stretches of predictability and eventual moral slippage.
Emmy Rossum has never been bolder nor more vulnerable as Alice Black. A NYPD vet now working an FBI crank call line, Alice is asked by Danny (Scoot McNairy), apparently the only decent man in her old Brooklyn precinct, to help crack the mysterious overdose death of a rich and respected judge.
The other local cops sneer at Alice and she gets the shakes when her former colleague Marshall (Jake Lacy) makes the crime scene. They’d been lovers — since high school, in fact — but he’s a mean drunk who battered her terribly while she showered.
So now Alice doesn’t wash. Danny and a suspect or two mention that she smells. Alice also dances like “Seinfeld’s” Elaine at her half-sister’s bachelorette party. And she likes sex rough; like, provoking Tinder dates to knock her around rough.
An avalanche of backstory revelations strains to explain such tendencies, but there are upsides to Alice’s profile too. For one, she’s a damn good detective, and the first to realize the judge’s death was murder. And she has a deeper-than-instinctual empathy for the prime suspect, a young woman with no apparent past and a preternatural ability to shift identities while dodging the heat.
Rossum delivers all her flawed heroine contradictions with utter conviction. The character’s slow drift toward becoming one with her further-gone prey demands more than any actress can be expected to give but, wow, there are moments when Rossum goes so deep and dark it’s stunning.
We eventually come around to calling the target of the investigation Catherine, and she’s played by protean Irish actor Lola Petticrew. As riveting here as in their “Say Nothing” portrayal of teenage IRA terrorist Dolours Price, Petticrew is 100% convincing for the longest time as an irresistibly seductive, genius-level strategist and gleefully sadistic sociopath. A whiz with overheated curling irons and fentanyl-filled syringes (No, not the eye! Not In The Eye!!!}, Catherine keeps us perpetually on edge as she sleeps and slaughters her way through monstrous rich men and a few innocent patsies. It’s a surprise-packed, scary performance even after it’s revealed that Catherine isn’t just psycho but an avenging angel aimed at the Epstein class.
As the murderer’s traumatic history is filled in, though, Meriwether lends the character a pathos that sometimes sploshes over into pathetic. Like Alice, unimaginable abuse made Catherine who she is. But even in a vengeance scenario as merited as this one, is it a good look to characterize a sexual violence survivor as a cold-blooded killer? At the same time, do we really need such a formidable force of righteous retribution justified — or worse, excused — as a hurt inner child lashing out?
Petticrew pulls all this off, as well as additional heartbreaking reasons for Catherine’s rampage. She avoids smothering the role in sentimentality, which lesser talents doubtless would. But Petticrew’s best when she’s just acting evil. If an argument can be made for too much complexity being detrimental to a character, it might start here.
Sorry if this is all sounding humorless. “Furious” certainly doesn’t have that problem, thanks in large part to the third wheel in this marvelous trio of indignant women.
Quincy Tyler Bernstine from the “Power” franchise plays Nora. Relegated to the basement of the FBI’s Manhattan office, she’s been on the underage sex abuse beat longer than anyone should. She’s full of regrets, has a drinking (and adjacent karaoke) problem and developed a hard-bitten persona to cope with it all.
Something in Alice’s determination to nail the guilty (Catherine as well as her targets) stirs the cynical crusader in Nora. She becomes a tough-love mentor to the impulsive younger investigator, and sometimes a hindrance. In this buddy cop relationship at least, complexity is the secret sauce that makes it unique and rewarding.
Nora delights — and delights viewers — in sticking it to the male higher-ups who have impeded her career and mission. Bernstine is not just verbally cutting but a deft physical comedian, especially when Nora tries to avoid angry bosses. But she’s a source of weary gravitas too.
“In my experience, being a victim of violence just makes you colder, more calculating,” she tells Alice during a late night hospital vigil. “Victims of violence are the most violent.”
The show’s at its best when that maxim is remembered.
The handful of “Furious” men who aren’t toxic also earn laughs for being the fools that they are. But one standout is neither. “Ramy’s” Steve Way plays Alden, a wheelchair-bound patient the medically trained Catherine cares for and enchants. Alden proves a hilarious thorn in the side of the official investigation, and Way can work with the quicksilver Petticrew like no one else in the ensemble.
A nice selection of guest stars — Rob Delaney, Hope Davis, Campbell Scott — serves craven scuzziness of a spectacular order. Their roles are written in a wicked way that also shapes the steel-trap quality of the plotting. It’s accomplished enough to almost make a virtue out of a snowballing set of implausibilities. Those nagging rationalizations also get more problematic as events near resolution – but to be honest, they satisfy on elemental thematic and emotional levels.
By the time cop and criminal are nearly indistinguishable from one another, the difference between crime and punishment is hopelessly muddled as well. Good and evil? Corruption and innocence? Pick your poison. “Furious” will inject it in both eyes.
“Furious” premieres Monday on Hulu.