★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
You have to admire showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether. She’s following up her hit sitcom “New Girl” with an eight-part bloody hell of a crime series called “Furious.” It’s about a female serial killer that forever darling Zoey Deschanel would never dream of playing, which is one of the reasons she’d probably be dynamite doing it.
No knock on Lola Petticrew. She inhabits the role of Catherine with a bruising commitment that cuts no corners on shock value. After being sex trafficked, Catherine turns serial killer of male one percenters that she enjoys dispatching with lethal doses of fentanyl.
It’s not easy catching this one. But the job falls to the formidable Emmy Rossum as Alice Black, a former NYPD homicide turned FBI agent. Both Alice and Lola seek justice, but each has her own method of meting it out. And there are prickly similarities.
You won’t know what hit you.
Which brings us to the source material of “Furious.” It’s Bob Rafelson’s 1987 “Black Widow,” starring Debra Winger as the agent and Theresa Russell as the femme who is all too fatale. With the advent of MeToo and the continuing fight for women’s rights, “Black Widow” went disturbingly light on feminist issues. The flirtation between the two women is clearly built for the male gaze. There needed to be a reckoning and it’s called “Furious.”
Catherine likes cosplaying the vulnerable little girl to attract her prey, wearing a cat mask for a particularly horrific Halloween homicide. Being helpless is how the scum first got to her. Playing helpless is how she now gets them.
And Alice, buffeted by rabid misogyny during her days in the male-dominated department, is always on the alert. Her ex-boyfriend, an abusive boozer of a cop played by Jake Lacy, found safety in the company of company men when her harassment claim against him somehow didn’t stick. Men, right?
Alice, knowing the feeling, gravitates to women who know the drill, like Nora (the magnificent Quincy Tyler Bernstine), who investigates FBI’s most grisly sex crimes against women. Alice and Nora indulge in gallows humor about women in a world of men. Alice even talks of voluntarily letting a man hit her. The abuse being consensual might be her way into understanding it.
Thorny issues are being tackled in “Furious” in the guise of a standard crime thriller that is anything but. The plot thickens without congealing when Scoot McNairy pops up as Dan, the rare NYPD honcho who retains a connection to Alice, the alleged traitor who dared to accuse a male cop of abuse. Together they see a link between the murders that draws them to Catherine and her own cache of secrets and lies. Petticrew exudes a perverse fascination in her role. But “Furious” belongs to Rossum and Bernstine, a dynamite team whose wit and gravitas put a human face on gender violence. You won’t know what hit you.