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It's not too often you hear about female serial killers, which makes the new show Furious a rarity.
It stars Emmy Rossum as a low-level FBI agent on the hunt for a young woman who's been targeting prominent tycoons throughout New York City.
The series comes from Liz Merriweather, the creator of New Girl and the Elizabeth Holmes miniseries, The Dropout, and it shows.
It's thrilling and twisty, the way serial killer dramas usually are, but it's also got a punchy sense of humor.
I'm Aisha Harris, and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is my co-host, Linda Holmes.
Hey, Linda.
Hello, Aisha.
And also with us is Vulture TV critic, Roxanna Haddadi.
Hey, Roxanna, welcome back.
Hello.
Thank you for having me.
So great to have you here, as always.
So when Furious begins, powerful businessmen are turning up suspiciously dead.
Emmy Rossum plays the troubled FBI agent Alice.
She's got a dark past and few allies at work or home.
Lola Petticrew plays Catherine, the crafty serial killer wrestling with her own trauma.
Both Cat and Mouse share something in common.
They're survivors of violence and of the systems that have failed to protect and support them.
Now, Alice has to work the case with an assortment of hard-worn individuals, including Scoot McNary as Danny, her former partner in the NYPD and closest confidant, and Quincy Tyler Bernstein as Nora, a quirky, jaded FBI agent.
Furious is loosely adapted from the 1987 crime thriller Black Widow, and it's streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
So, Roxanna, I know that you have reviewed this show.
You've also interviewed Liz Merriweather and Emmy Rossum for Vulture.
Loved reading those.
Everyone should check them out.
So I know kind of how you feel about the show, but I really want to hear more about what draws you to Furious.
I think that it is something that you alluded to in your intro, which is the female serial killer to me is such an interesting concept because I think we
Societally have this obsession with male serial killers.
And I'm part of that, right?
Like I watched Mindhunter.
I love Michael Mann's Manhunter, Silence of the Lambs.
Like we have so many of these sort of stories.
And I think we have a real fascination with why men kill people, including women.
And usually the answer is it's because they hate women.
Like I think it's pretty cut and dry at a certain point.
And so I'm sort of fascinated by like the oppositional point of that and what makes a woman do these things and what pushes her to that.
Right.
Right.
Right.
And then I just think that this is a fantastically constructed show.
I mean, it is playing within a genre that we are all incredibly aware of.
The cop show, the FBI show, these are all over our televisions.
But I think that the writing on this, for me, felt very...
Textured and sardonically funny in a way that I did not expect.
And I think the performances across the board are just
I think Emmy Rossum is doing something with Alice that is very unexpected.
This is not really a spoiler necessarily.
But something I think is very interesting is her character has been a victim of violence.
And we see that she has almost incorporated that violence now into her sex life.
She's trying to make sense of what happened to her now through the men that she hooks up with and that's something that I don't think I've ever seen on television before and that really blew me away in how prickly and thorny it is
Lola Petticrew is doing amazing work.
Scoot McNary and his hang dog face is always welcome on my television.
That face.
That face.
That face.
So there's just a lot that I went into this thinking like the tropes are there.
I don't want to diminish like the tropes are present.
But I think that the show sort of turns them all on their head in a way that I really enjoyed.
And I do have to say there is a cathartic thrill in this current moment in seeing evil 1% men.
Get some sort of end point.
I don't want to say like, I'm pro murder.
But I think socially, in light of the Epstein files, I think there is something that the show is tapping into culturally, which is really interesting and fascinating.
Right.
To that point, Catherine is targeting rich, powerful men who assaulted her when she was a teenager.
So yeah, it's scratching a very particular itch and I think tapping into a lot of the anxieties that a lot of us are feeling at this moment.
So yeah, I can totally relate to that, Roxanna.
Linda, you and I have both watched our fair share of
I have very mixed feelings about it.
I think that I completely agree with Roxanna about the performances.
I think they're all exceptional pretty much to a person.
I did not think of this as a serial killer show, in which case I agree it would feel fresh.
I thought of this as a vigilante show.
Right.
In which case, I don't think it feels so fresh.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
The show is saying something less interesting than it thinks it's saying, which is there is an urge to violence when you've been harmed.
Like, yes, that is true.
That is what vigilantes are.
And I think that because I thought about it in that way, it did not feel particularly like an interesting story to me.
I also think it's quite repetitive in the middle part.
I think you see...
Certain sequences of kind of how Catherine operates repeat over and over, and you kind of know what she's going to do.
And there was part of me that was like, I get it.
I get it.
I get what she's going to do.
I get that this is going to be driven by the same stuff.
And the last thing I will say is I am just exhausted from it.
Every story about quote-unquote complex women is a story about trauma from sexual violence
I feel like I have seen that now so many times that I need to feel like you have something new to say about that because otherwise it feels to me like kind of the pulling of a fairly familiar trope.
And I don't care for that as a trope.
It's interesting because I too have seen this stuff from Liz Merriweather where she's like, what I wanted to think about was what could make a woman a serial killer.
I think a lot of things could make a woman a serial killer.
Many people experience trauma and do not become serial killers.
And many people kill people not because of trauma.
I watch Dataline.
Yeah.
So I have some mixed feelings about where they're actually coming from with this story.
But I agree that the performances are so good.
Particularly, you made mention of Quincy Tyler Bernstein playing Nora, who is...
Alice's kind of boss.
I think that performance is so cool and so odd.
And it was so welcome because that is A, not a typical law enforcement boss.
That is not a typical anything.
And it felt so individual that it was always interesting to me to watch her.
So I just have...
I feel like having heard you both describe it, I would place myself firmly in the middle of both of your reactions, which is that, yeah, I do feel like if this had been like a tight six episodes, I think it would have been a bit more economical and would have been able to make the same points it makes effectively.
Yeah.
Because the tropes are there.
It's like, okay, yes, it is about exploring trauma, but then it's also there is that sort of like desire, I think, that the writers are pulling on of like, we want to also see this woman or both these women get some sort of revenge.
And so...
That becomes, okay, how many times are we going to watch Catherine do the same thing?
It's not even like she's doing anything really different every time she does.
I was going to also pick out Quincy Tyler Bernstein here.
She was the character that I latched on to the most here.
Her sort of dry delivery, she's playing a character who is like,
I just found that really interesting because out of all the tropes here, it's the one I don't think we often see in a performance this big and this prominent in the story.
Bernstein has been in a lot of things.
I realized after looking at her filmography, I was like, oh, she's been in a lot of things I've seen before, but this has to be the biggest, most complex role I've seen her in.
And so she was kind of a revelation here.
And I love that sort of dance that her and Emmy Rossum's character have.
And I think, Roxanna, you might have talked about this in your review earlier.
But this idea that, like, even though they are both women working this really hard case and the Nora character is actually like she is part of the sex crimes unit within the FBI, even though they're both women, they don't automatically just gravitate toward each other.
And they have a very kind of like antagonistic.
And sort of like older versus younger, more experienced versus less experienced.
But then they also have their own issues.
And, you know, Nora is also an alcoholic.
It's like those things I think are what makes this rich and enjoyable experience.
But it also just like to what end, I guess, is the question is like what new here is being explored?
And I'm not sure the show necessarily answers this.
Yeah.
For me anyway.
I will also say I would not appoint myself the person to explain this, but I think the fact that Nora is a black woman in this office is.
Yes.
Without it being something that she brings up all the time or that other people bring up all the time.
But you feel it.
You feel it in her relationship with Alice.
You certainly feel it in her relationship with her boss.
And you feel it in her relationship to her job.
When Aisha was talking about her kind of...
Having just enough to stay engaged.
I think it's related to that as well.
So I really thought they did a good job of doing what we always talk about, which is like that kind of thing.
It's part of the character, but that doesn't mean you want every conversation the person has to be about...
That specifically out loud.
You know what I mean?
And so I did really, you know, beyond all the other things that I admired about that character, that was one of the things I thought was very effective.
Totally.
All right.
Well, we've got lots more to say about Furious after a quick break.
This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air.
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It seems more explicitly anti-human right now than ever before.
There seemed to be something that's dovetailing with the age of AI.
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And we're back.
So before the break, Linda, you were talking about what this show was sort of bringing to this genre.
And Roxanna, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as well.
Aisha, I feel like Linda answered in the way that I was going to answer as to what feels new.
It almost brings me back to our conversation about Nemesis.
I think at this point in my endless TV consumption, I'm increasingly okay with something that doesn't necessarily feel new in terms of narrative, but new in terms of character and in terms of performance.
And I do think that the cast here and sort of what they're doing with these characters and the twists that they're putting on them, I mean, there is a conversation between...
Emmy Russell's character and Quincy Tyler Bernstein's character in a hospital.
And I won't say anything more than that.
But it is one of the most antagonistic, confrontational, resentful conversation between two female characters.
Right.
That I have seen in this sort of show.
And so on the one hand, no.
I don't think it does anything really new in terms of our question of like vigilante justice or even what is justice.
Like how do you obtain justice in this current era?
Yeah.
In the world we are living in right now, what does justice look like for a woman?
Yeah.
In the society we're living in right now, what does that look like?
I don't think it offers like a new answer by any means.
But I think that like the way that these actors are playing the struggle of that question and how impossible it is to answer is what kept me pressing play on each new screener.
Yeah.
I also think there are moments, and again, not that this is necessarily new, but that I at least liked seeing here where kind of what Linda was talking about, where the fact that Nora is sort of, she's a Black woman, she's an alcoholic, she has all these things, and it's always just like simmering beneath the surface of her interactions.
There's also just moments where you see
The emmy rossum character alice in a room with like mostly white men and they're talking about victims as if like they'll use the terms that are not sensitive right like at one point
One of them is like how do we know that this person isn't just like trying to get money they're a prostitute
Like how do we know that they weren't just trying to get money
And then you know alice is like well
No money has been withdrawn from the people who have been killed.
So I don't think that's the issue.
And like, Alice knows all of these things that these men don't understand.
And
Have we seen that before?
Sure.
Is it obvious?
Yes.
But to see it sort of played out in a not as overt way as some of the other conversations that happened in the show, I liked seeing that.
And it can never be overstated, I think, that that is the case and that can be the way things work.
One other relationship I did kind of latch on to was Catherine's relationship with Alden, who's played by Steve Way.
You may recognize him from the show Rami.
He's disabled and infurious.
His character needs a nurse most of the time, around the clock almost.
And so Catherine has kind of stepped in as his nurse.
But he is a character who
Knows that she's not who she says she is, and, like, is totally fine with it.
And it's interesting to me to see their relationship because we know she is a survivor of sex trafficking, and yet...
She has a sort of flirtatious relationship that in other situations we might be like, this doesn't feel right.
Like he's asking her to like lift up her shirt and she's totally complies.
But I think it's interesting to watch that dynamic because she doesn't view him as a threat.
And I think that that sort of aspect of how her character and how that plays out
It's not quite the way that I'm used to seeing it in pop culture.
And that felt fresh to me in a way.
Yeah.
My initial response to that character was a little bit to recoil from taking a person who you know is killing a bunch of people and
Like, I immediately kind of recoiled from that.
Yeah.
Because I wasn't sure what they were doing with it.
There's also a kind of a thing with the Scoot McNary character involving someone in his life with a disability.
And I had this moment where I was like, I don't know about this, you guys.
But I think as they go on...
In part because the performance from Steve Way is so strong, he actually really becomes one of the more, I think, emotionally affecting and interesting people in the show, but also definitely one of the funnier people in the show.
And I think the funny thing is at first I wasn't sure that the comedy was fitting well with how
Bleak and sad a lot of the story is.
But as I went on, I really did come to appreciate his performance.
Rob Delaney was becoming such an interesting character
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was also great in Dying for Sex, too.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's becoming like a Meriwether repeat player.
He's doing such interesting things.
And I think if you want somebody who can be, you know, kind of like a smoothie, but then also pathetic...
At other times, I think he's very good at that.
And then I would finally mention Rob Yang, who played Lawrence on Succession, the guy from Walter.
Yeah.
In this yeah and I think he's terrific and it's another thing where like I'm not sure that I think this all fits together I'm not sure that as a project I like it but
But there are individual elements of it that I can look at and say, this works really well.
This works really well.
And all of those performances, Steve Way, Rob Delaney, Rob Yang, all really work for me as kind of comedic flavor.
Rob Yang is also, I'm rewatching The Americans.
And it's like seeing him in The Americans.
Yeah.
Seeing him in this.
He was in this movie, She Rides Shotgun, as another sort of like cop chasing a big case.
I just, I think it's interesting, Linda, what you said about like not being sure about the caregiver aspect to me was amazing.
Oh, I respond to this because again, it's doing something in terms of like the characters almost feeling at odds with themselves.
But also in reality, like I think a lot of female serial killers are caregivers because it is this like, unfortunately, it is probably an easy way to kill people.
Right.
So I do think there are elements here that feel pulled from the research that Meriwether and Russom did speaking to FBI agents, speaking to female cops.
I think maybe for me, what I am responding to is the fact that the show feels sometimes at odds with itself.
In a way that I think is really fascinating.
Sure.
And I agree with you.
What I'm responding to is just the concern that I don't think plays out in the show.
I don't think this is what happens.
But it's just like, I don't like the thing...
Right, that totally makes sense.
But that is not what this ends up being.
And I want to be really clear about that.
That is an initial reaction that I had.
But I don't think that's how this plays out.
Yeah.
And a totally understandable position because I can't reach into Liz Merriweather's mind or any of the writers' minds on this show.
But I do think that feels like an intentional reaction.
Reaction that they wanted at first and then the way it plays out is that we learned
It's very integral to the plot not just to the emotional aspect of it but like we learn in the first episode that these men are turning up dead and they're supposed to be overdoses
But of course Alice Emmy Rossum's character is like I don't think this is this doesn't look like an overdose and
The reason why Catherine can get these drugs to overdose with is through her job.
So, yes, it's very layered.
It's very complicated.
It's both emotionally complicated, but also it's important to the plot.
And I think that is what ultimately, as Linda said, helps open it up and make it less icky.
You feel bad for Catherine, but also you're like you chose a different path than what Alice chose and what other women and other victims and survivors of abuse have chosen.
And so I think it walks that very fine line.
And I do want to leave space for the fact that I think Roxanna is legitimately pro Catherine murdering these people.
And I think that is totally fine.
Thank you.
I think that I just want to I just want to suggest I think that is perfectly OK. Roxanna is like on Catherine's side when it comes to what she decides to do.
And I am fine with that.
Yes.
And to be clear, Catherine is a fictional character.
None of these people are real, despite the fact that they may hold some very strong similarities to actual real people in real life.
Yes.
We're talking about a made-up story.
Yes.
Thank you, Linda.
I just want to give Roxanna her space to be.
No, thank you, Linda.
We need to make sure we leave space for every.
I will say Roxanna and I spoke offline about this a little bit.
And I was like, I don't know, I had a hard time with like these scenes where she's like torturing people.
And Roxanna was like, no, I wanted like more.
Right.
Literally verbatim.
Okay.
Well, we are all, if not necessarily pro-murdering these guys, we are pro at least checking this out, see if it vibes with you, see if it works for you.
The performances are great.
That brings us to the end of this show.
Roxanna Haddadi, Linda Holmes, thanks so much for being here.
And I'm so glad we all had like varying perspectives on this.
This was a fun conversation.
This was fun.
Thank you.
Yeah, absolutely.
This episode was produced by Lennon Sherburn, Hafsa Fathima, and Mike Katzeff, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.
Hello, Come In provides our theme music.
And thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Aisha Harris, and we'll see you all next time.
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Like, that's unbelievable.
Everything is unbelievable.
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