Emmy Rossum spent nine seasons on Shameless playing Fiona Gallagher, the oldest sister in a large, broke Chicago family who kept everyone fed and out of trouble while her own life fell apart. Now she is back on Hulu, and the show she returned for has become the biggest thing on streaming.
According to Collider, Furious has been number one on both Hulu and Disney+ for three straight weeks, holding a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The eight-episode thriller was created by Elizabeth Meriwether and follows Rossum as Alice Black, a former NYPD homicide detective who was recruited by the FBI and then buried on a tip line. Alice has an abusive ex, a half-abandoned apartment, and a serial murder investigation that hits closer to home than anyone around her realizes.
Meriwether built her career creating New Girl, but her recent projects have moved in a darker direction. The Dropout followed Elizabeth Holmes lying her way through Silicon Valley. Dying for Sex charted a woman dismantling her marriage after a terminal diagnosis. Furious puts two more women on a collision course, this time on opposite sides of a string of murders across New York City's five boroughs.
The show borrows the bones of the 1987 film Black Widow and strips them down. Where that film centered on a woman marrying and killing wealthy men for money, Meriwether scraps the financial motive entirely. Lola Petticrew plays Catherine Grace, a woman in her twenties who is also killing powerful men, but every one of her targets connects back to a trafficking network. The season slowly makes clear that each victim has earned what is coming to them, and the show leaves room for the audience to wrestle with whether Catherine's revenge is justified.
Rossum's Alice Black is chasing Catherine across the city while carrying her own damage into the case. Scoot McNairy plays her FBI partner Dan, and the two share an easy dynamic that sometimes tips into unrequited tension. Quincy Tyler Bernstine plays Nora Washington, the head of the FBI's sex crimes unit, a woman who has been doing this work long enough that it has worn grooves into her. She has been talked over and treated as a token hire by people above her and is still standing.
Meriwether's approach to the material keeps the show from settling into a standard procedural. Furious is less interested in the mechanics of catching a killer than in what it costs the people on both sides of the chase. Catherine's targets are not random. Alice's investigation is personal in ways she has not fully admitted. The institutional forces that are supposed to stop violence keep failing the women caught inside it, and neither the detective nor the killer is operating with clean hands.
Rossum carries most of that weight. Her Alice Black shares the exhausted, barely-holding-it-together quality that made Fiona Gallagher compelling on Shameless, but stripped of the family that gave Fiona both her burden and her purpose. There is no one left to hold Alice up, and Rossum plays that isolation without pushing it into melodrama.
Furious is available now on Hulu, with all eight episodes streaming.
