If you’re in need of a new show to binge over this (or any) long weekend, I’m imploring you: Watch Furious. The eight-episode crime thriller’s first season just wrapped up this week and its incredible finale locked in this show as my favorite new drama — and maybe TV show, period — of the year.
It’s already been a good year for TV show debuts. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms had a built-in audience, being part of the Game of Thrones-verse, but stood out with its charming buddy duo in Dunk and Egg. Widow’s Bay grew into the breakout TV hit of early summer, with people fawning over its idiosyncratic genre blend and stellar ensemble. Lanterns is doing pretty well, too (when it’s not pissing some people off). But Hulu’s Furious is the latest surprise show that has broken containment, growing week-over-week — the finale had 90% more views than the premiere, which already cracked the bottom of Nielson’s streaming charts, according to Variety. It’s already been greenlit for a second season. Basically, Furious is special and people are noticing.
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Created by Elizabeth Meriweather, who’s best known for New Girl, Furious is just barely based on the 1987 movie Black Widows, which starred Debra Winger and Theresa Russell, but toss aside any assumptions you might make based on that creative pedigree combo. It’s hardly a breezy half-hour sitcom, though it knows how to deploy humor to cut through the bleakness, and has almost nothing in common with the ‘80s film aside from the women serial killer/Fed dynamic.
Furious is often a difficult watch based on the details of its dead-serious subject matter, but it has an almost unbelievable iron grip over its pacing and tone. Things will happen that make your stomach churn, but it never crosses over into exploitation, handling all of the show’s many thorny complexities head-on with care. The mounting tension is so dialed in that scenes — sometimes action-driven, other times just an interrogation — feel palpably dangerous, creating that propulsive “I gotta watch another episode” itch. Frankly, I’m envious of those starting it now, when you don’t have to wait a week between episodes. (At the same time, I’m also relieved it got the old-school weekly episode release treatment to find an audience and wasn’t dumped all at once.)
On paper, Furious may sound like any other decent cat-and-mouse crime drama, but it really is so much more. That’s in no small part thanks to the depth of characters and electric performances, especially from its core cast of women characters, all (as the title implies) of whom are full of justified rage. Petticrew — who was also great in Say Nothing, last year’s excellent Hulu series about the Irish Republican Army during The Troubles — gives Catherine a trauma-laden, erratic unpredictability with huge emotional peaks and valleys, and yet never becomes hammy. Rossum — probably best known for Shameless and Phantom of the Opera — simmers as Alice, who can be stoic, cruel, selfish, and compassionate all at once. Perhaps best of all is Quincy Tyler Bernstine — while lauded for stage acting, she’s made plenty of prestige-y TV appearances — as Nora Washington, Alice’s boss and Greek mythology enthusiast who doesn’t waste a single word during her screen time. The men are pretty good, too: Scoot McNairy as the exhausted good cop, Jake Lacy as the insatiable bad cop, Rob Yang as a sort-of-stupid FBI agent, Danny McCarthy as a corrupt jerk FBI ASAC, and Steve Way as the hopelessly romantic and mold-breaking comic relief.
I’m being purposefully cagey about the grimier plot specifics because I really think new watchers are best served in knowing as little as possible before going in, learning the dark, reality-coded secrets of Furious as you watch. But if you want to take a dive into a messed-up series that will almost definitely be in Emmy conversations next year, you know where to look.
Leanne Butkovic (she/they) is an Editorial Programming Manager at IGN, where they’ve also written about TV, movies, and games.
