I'm Furious. This TV Show Understands Why.

It's weird to discover that your main emotional reaction to a gruesome show about a serial killer is a sense of relief, but that's how I felt while watching 'Furious,' Hulu's taut police procedural that ended its first season last week. The show, which at first came across like a high-gloss 'Law & Order' analogue, turned out to be the anti-'Law & Order' — and, at the same time, the first true post-Epstein thriller. 'Furious' didn't need to be this sophisticated to win me over. I am into most cop shows. And I am reliably fanatical about all cop shows that star cool actresses wearing very little makeup, bad poly-blend sweaters and giant stomping boots to make them seem driven mad to the point of unattractiveness by their fixation on righting the world's wrongs. For years, like a lot of women, I've watched 'Law & Order: SVU' as a kind of emotional balm — exposure therapy for the sexual violence that surrounds us, but reliably delivered with a safe and tidy resolution before the credits roll. Horrible things happen; jaded but capable detectives track the perpetrators down; something like justice gets restored to the world. But 'Furious,' a cat-and-mouse thriller loosely based on the 1987 film 'Black Widow' and starring Lola Petticrew as an avenging murderess and Emmy Rossum as the agent on her tail, is not that kind of show. At the risk of employing the summer's most overexposed classical reference, 'Furious' is a Trojan horse. It arrives dressed as exactly the kind of entertainment it intends to interrogate — a slick drama trading in violence against women as spectacle. Yet over eight episodes, the series reveals itself to be something more nuanced and ultimately more harrowing: a cops-and-killers show that doesn't pretend that the system works, or that justice gets served. Ms. Rossum, who developed 'Furious' along with the show's creator, Liz Meriwether, plays Alice Black, a former police detective turned F.B.I. special agent who's sorting through the wreckage of an abusive relationship with another cop. Alice's superior, Nora Washington, head of the F.B.I.'s sex crimes unit — played with breathtaking command by Quincy Tyler Bernstine — has run out of faith that the system she serves is capable of doing much of anything for the girls it's supposed to protect. Mx. Petticrew plays Catherine, the terrifying killer who is also a terrified victim; trafficked as a girl, she is seeking revenge against the powerful men who abused her and her closest friend. 'Furious' turns out to be a mystery that's less about whodunit (we know that from the very first scene) than who's complicit — an indictment of a social system that damages and discards women and corrupts everyone it touches. It's the first time I've seen onscreen a story that so precisely captures the day-in-and-day-out emotional toll of living in a society that perpetually victimizes, persecutes, undermines and abuses women — the physical, emotional, spiritual grind of it. The show never feels prim, scolding, or woke, but it also could exist only now, after years of the diligent, painful real-world exposure of the realities of patriarchal abuse of power, as demonstrated in the details of the Epstein case. It chronicles how vast, deep and far the corrosion travels, forcing a reckoning not just with what happened to these girls, but with who was entertained by the trauma the girls experienced and who got to look away. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.