The Crime Drama of the Year Is All About Female Rage

Most dramas about murderous women save the revelations of deviance for the end, after parceling out uncertainty and complication.

Furious does things exactly backwards.

Here is a monster , the Hulu series announces with its very first scene, during which an unblinking blonde in a Halloween cat mask kills a man by forcibly injecting him with fentanyl, which she keeps in a bedazzled silver tin.

“I don’t really like listening to you,” she whispers, as he gasps for breath.

“I don’t like the sounds you’re making.

But I love your smile.” After he dies, she reaches for a bowl of candy corn, which she eats slowly and with care, piece by piece.

The scene felt confrontational to me at first watch, as though it were daring me to switch it off in discomfort.

But why? Crime shows begin with violated women all the time—the naked, bloodied female corpse is such a staple in the genre’s visual language that viewers hardly notice it.

Why is a scene of a young woman luxuriating in her sadistic treatment of a man so unsettling? As Furious goes on, it offers up more murders, but also more context for why this woman, Catherine (played by Lola Petticrew), is doing what she’s doing—and although she remains monstrous, the show shades in her full, horrifying humanity.

Furious —created by the writer Liz Meriwether and executive-produced by the actor Emmy Rossum, who also stars in it—is preoccupied with elemental ideas about violence and transformation, which juxtapose nicely with the more conventional framework of a police procedural.

Rossum plays Alice, a former detective turned FBI grunt who’s dragged into investigating Catherine’s latest victim by her former partner Danny (Scoot McNairy).

Like Catherine, Alice has been warped by trauma; her previous boyfriend, also a police officer (Jake Lacy), beat her, and all of her colleagues except Danny froze her out when she finally reported him.

She uses apps to find sexual partners who will agree to beat her, role-playing her own abuse.

In one episode, she outright refuses to shower, a tendency that seems off-putting until her sister reveals to Danny that her ex used to drag her from the shower to hit her, sometimes leaving her passed out under the running water. [ Read: Everything we know about rape is wrong ] Early on, the show evokes Medusa—whose rape at the hands of Poseidon saw her turned into a hideous Gorgon with snakes for hair—in reference to Catherine, whose own history is at least as cruel; there are also multiple references to the Furies, winged goddesses of retribution.