Entertainment
‘Shameless’ Star’s 8-Part Serial Killer Thriller Is Officially the Biggest Show on Streaming
If you watched Shameless, you know Emmy Rossum. If you didn’t, here’s a recap: she spent nine seasons playing Fiona Gallagher, the oldest sister in a huge, broke, barely functional Chicago family. Fiona was the person who kept everyone fed and out of jail while her own life was falling apart. She made terrible decisions, dated terrible men, and never really had the luxury of fixing her own problems because someone else’s crisis was always louder. It was a messy, exhausting performance, and Rossum was good at it.
Now she’s back on Furious, Elizabeth Meriwether‘s eight-episode Hulu thriller, and she’s playing a version of that same broken woman — except this one doesn’t have a family to hold her up. Alice Black is an ex-NYPD detective the FBI hired and then buried on a tip line. She’s got an abusive ex and an apartment that looks like she’s been meaning to move out for two years. And she’s chasing a female serial killer across the five boroughs while a mountain of personal and institutional baggage actively tries to kill her. Furious has been number one on both Hulu and Disney+ for three straight weeks, holding a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Rossum is the biggest reason to press play.
‘New Girl’s Creator Turned Female Rage Into the Best Thriller on Streaming
Meriwether, who created Furious, started her career with New Girl, something worth mentioning because everything she’s done since has been about women burning their lives down. The Dropout followed Elizabeth Holmes lying her way through Silicon Valley. Dying for Sex charted a woman blowing up her marriage after a terminal diagnosis. Furious tracks two more, this time on opposite sides of a serial murder investigation.
The show takes the bones of the 1987 movie Black Widow and strips them for parts. Where that film gave us a woman marrying and killing rich men for money, Meriwether scraps the gold-digger angle entirely. Lola Petticrew plays Catherine Grace, a twenty-something murdering wealthy, powerful men, but every one of them connects back to a trafficking network. She’s not hunting for a fortune; she’s hunting predators. The season slowly makes clear that every target has earned what’s coming, and the show is smart enough to let you sit with whether Catherine is justified in her quest for revenge.
On the other side, Rossum’s Alice Black is a former homicide detective the FBI poached and then buried in answering tip-line calls. She’s overqualified and sidelined, carrying her own damage into an investigation that hits closer to home than anyone around her realizes. Scoot McNairy plays her partner Dan, and they’ve got an easy dynamic that sometimes simmers with sexual tension and unrequited feelings. Then there’s Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Nora Washington, the head of the FBI’s sex crimes unit, who’s been doing this work long enough that the job has worn grooves into her. She’s been talked over and treated like a token hire by people above her, and she’s still standing. She’s the version of Alice who survived the system instead of getting chewed up by it, and watching Bernstine give voice to her pride, exhaustion, and risk-taking gives the show a weight it wouldn’t have without her.
Emmy Rossum and Lola Petticrew Are the Reason ‘Furious’ Isn’t Just Another Crime Show
On paper, a serial killer thriller about sex trafficking from the New Girl creator sounds like a tonal disaster. It’s not. Meriwether has spent four years figuring out how to write women who crack jokes while everything around them is terrible, and she’s good at it by now. And Petticrew is her wild card. She’s physically small and looks younger than she is. Catherine uses both of those things as weapons. The show feeds her backstory in pieces, and Petticrew keeps you hungry for morsels with every torture sequence and murderous mood swing.
The reason Furious works is that Meriwether gives every woman on screen an interior life, so none of them ever flatten into props for the plot. Alice gets to be bitingly sarcastic, even in her suffering. Catherine gets to be charming as she drugs and starves her victims to death. Nora gets to be exhausted and righteous at every turn. The female rage is the point, and these three women are the delivery vehicles.
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