Emmy Rossum and Elizabeth weigh in on Furious's crime tale

Emmy Rossum and Elizabeth Meriwether frame Hulu's Furious as a taboo yet tender crime drama: a traumatized FBI agent tracking a female serial killer whose vengeance plot collides with her own past. In Mashable interviews with co-star Lola Petticrew, they explain how the series confronts trafficking and assault without turning either into spectacle.

That is the core pitch behind the new series, which dropped its first three episodes on Hulu with new installments every Monday through Aug. 31. For viewers who follow TV's long arc of female antiheroes, the show also belongs in our Nostalgia: Then & Now lane — a 1980s neo-noir idea remade for a streaming era that wants psychology, not just chase scenes.

Key Takeaways

• Emmy Rossum and Elizabeth Meriwether describe Furious as a cat-and-mouse crime tale grounded in trauma, not shock value.
• The Hulu series adapts the spirit of 1987's Black Widow into a present-tense story about two women shaped by violence.
• Rossum's Alice Black and Lola Petticrew's killer are written as colliding survivors, linked by an “invisible thread of sisterhood.”
• Meriwether keeps child trafficking and sexual assault off-screen as spectacle, trusting performance to carry the stakes.
• The first three episodes are streaming now, with weekly Monday releases through Aug. 31.

What is Furious, and why are Emmy Rossum and Elizabeth talking about it now?

Furious is a new crime drama created by Elizabeth Meriwether, the writer-producer behind New Girl and Dying for Sex. Emmy Rossum stars as Alice Black, a traumatized FBI agent — and she also produces — while Lola Petticrew plays the female serial killer Alice is hunting on a deadly quest for vengeance.

According to Mashable's coverage of the launch, the premiere stretch unfolds a mysterious murderess who appears to be targeting a child trafficking ring. Critic Kristy Puchko has praised Meriwether's blend of dark subject matter with resilient humor, and the way the show addresses child trafficking and sexual assault without making a spectacle of either.

Puchko sat down with Meriwether, Rossum, and Petticrew across three in-person interviews to unpack the series' origins, its handling of tough topics, and what Petticrew calls the “superpower” of the central killer. That is why Emmy Rossum and Elizabeth are in the conversation right now: the show has just arrived, and they are explaining how a taboo premise can still feel tender.

How does a 1987 neo-noir become today's Furious?

Meriwether told Mashable the spark was not a Marvel title but Bob Rafelson's 1987 neo-noir Black Widow, in which Debra Winger tracks a suspected black-widow killer. She remembered the film's refusal to over-explain characters, plus a strange, moving stretch where hunter and hunted simply hang out at the beach.

“I see these two women as just so desperate for connection with each other,” Meriwether said. In some ways, she added, they are the only ones who can see the real person underneath their façades — and she wanted to put that into the show.

Adapting a movie for TV, she argued, needs a clear why. That led her into the psychological “why these two women became the women that they are,” and inevitably toward victims of violence. Research on female serial killers, she said, pointed to a common theme: victims of violence who then become perpetrators of violence.

“I got excited about the possibility of just complicating all of that and showing how the experience of violence can get in your bones and come out in very strange, self-sabotaging ways,” Meriwether explained. “And it can also come out in violent ways to other people.” The then-and-now remake instinct is less about copying plot points than deepening the emotional collision.

Why do Emmy Rossum and Elizabeth refuse flashbacks of the abuse?

Dialogue reveals that both Alice and the mysterious killer have been victims of violence. Alice was battered by her ex-boyfriend, a Brooklyn detective played by Jake Lacy. The killer was trafficked as a teenager. Yet Meriwether was emphatic about skipping flashbacks.

“I think that it was important to me to keep the focus on these two women now, in the present moment, and not go back and show everything… that happened to them,” she said. Rossum backed that choice: Liz was more interested in the effects of violence on how the characters behave now than in replaying the assaults.

For Alice, Rossum said, that means deep disconnection. She does not believe she can get justice for herself, so she becomes obsessed with getting justice for others — even at the expense of taking care of herself. One outward sign is that she is unable to shower; the show lets her smell bad, which Rossum called a brave cultural marker of shame.

Alice's coping also turns extreme at work and in intimacy. She has become “such a machine in this job that she invites these strangers into her house to fight.” Rossum admitted she was scared of that scene on first read and worked with a psychologist to understand her resistance, the overlap with the character, and the separation between them.

For Alice, she said, “love and sexuality, violence and control have existed within the same relationship.” The creative goal was an unflinching, fresh look at what a victim of violence can look like — for both “the good guy” agent and “the bad guy” killer — who are on a collision course and may share “an invisible thread of sisterhood.”

Who is the killer, and what makes her taboo but tender?

Rather than a gold-digging black widow, Petticrew's character is a shapeshifter with a girly streak even while she drugs men on her kill list. Her name itself is unstable, shifting from Jinny to Vanessa and eventually Catherine across the early episodes.

Viewers watch her skip through New York with girlish abandon, perform fear to access a domestic violence shelter, seduce an expensive lawyer, then rush to a cozy house for a nurse's-aid shift. Petticrew said she understood Catherine's “heart and the crux” and motivation early, once Meriwether revealed more after she signed on.

“That is sort of Catherine's superpower,” Petticrew said: learning early, as someone socialized as a woman, to read the emotional temperature of rooms — for safety, or so you are not underestimated. For Catherine and Alice, she argued, that skill is also a trauma response. “Unfortunately, it comes from something quite dark and horrible. But she's able to harness it and use it to achieve her means.”

That mix — menace, play, survival craft, and withheld exploitation imagery — is what Emmy Rossum and Elizabeth keep returning to: a crime tale that stays taboo in subject while staying tender toward the survivors at its center. If you want the cast and creator in their own words, Mashable is continuing interview snippets across the season as Monday episodes roll out through the end of August.