Hulu’s Breakout Hit Features a Trio of Sterling Performances. But One Stands Above the Rest.

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Hulu’s sleeper critical hit Furious , which wraps up its first season today, stars a trio of Furies: Catherine (Lola Petticrew), the childlike, vicious trafficking victim turned serial killer; Alice (Emmy Rossum), the rookie FBI agent and ex-cop who left the force after nobody believed her cop boyfriend had abused her; and Nora Washington, the head of the FBI’s sex crimes unit, played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine as the most magnificently bitter, self-medicating agent to hit the small screen in a minute. All three performances are sterling, but it’s Bernstine who has become a true breakout, memorable for her references to Balzac, Greek mythology, and Beckett (“I went to a fancy school and I’m very smart,” she tells Alice); her moments of unsentimental, hard-won social analysis (“In my experience, being a victim of violence just makes you colder. More calculating”); and her Ernie-striped turtlenecks and flowered Hawaiian shirts. If Nora’s not on the screen, you long for a glimpse of her—that grizzle of gray hair, those vivid, expressive eyes. Bernstine is shorter than most of her co-stars, but draws the eye in every scene. It helps a lot that every good line is hers.

Unlike her two fellow furies, whose histories we’ve come to know throughout the show’s eight episodes, Nora still feels like she came out of nowhere. In the course of this season, we’ve found out a bit about her professional backstory—that fancy school, the way her early-career supervisor mocked her for being a “diversity hire”—but still nothing about her family or childhood. The actress’ relative anonymity augments the viewer’s happy impression that Nora is a gift out of the clear blue sky. Although Bernstine isn’t totally new to TV—17 episodes of Power , 10 of Ray Donovan , a three-episode arc in And Just Like That —in this role, really a third lead, she’ll be a surprise to anyone who’s not an expert at the sport of television facespotting. She’s a Tony-nominated theater actor and, apparently, a beloved audiobook narrator , which viewers of Furious can well believe—Bernstine’s line delivery snaps and romps, especially in her confrontations with Ed George (Danny McCarthy), the smarmy, corrupt assistant special agent who’s her particular foe. “I’m not getting high and mighty, I am high and mighty!” Nora spits at Ed, deliciously off the rails, in Furious ’ season finale. “I’m flying above you and looking down on you and taking a nice long piss and it’s just falling down on your head like rain!”

Did I mention Nora is often a little bit drunk? We first meet the agent in her windowless basement office, a denlike space absolutely crammed with random plastic bags, binders, and Costco-sized boxes of snacks. “Why do you want to work in the basement on sex crimes and crimes against children?” Nora asks Alice. “Do you hate yourself? Don’t answer that.” The idea that working sex crimes might mess a person up is far from new territory for a crime show to explore, but it’s the particular things Nora does to be able to continue to do her job that are interesting.