Furious: Disney+ Crime Thriller Fuels Female Rage
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Furious is an eight-episode crime thriller created by Elizabeth Meriwether, powered throughout by an unfaltering current of female rage and starring three complicated lead female characters.
- Elizabeth Meriwether wrote the first three episodes and previously created Dying for Sex (2024, starring Michelle Williams) and The Dropout (2022, about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes), both based on true stories.
- Emmy Rossum plays Alice Black, a former NYPD officer who left the force after her cop boyfriend assaulted her; the department then turned against her when she reported him.
- Lola Petticrew plays Catherine, who in the opening scene watches a man die on a staircase after injecting him, while Quincy Tyler Bernstine plays FBI sex crimes unit boss Nora Washington, Alice's unofficial mentor.
- The central plot tracks a hunt for a female serial killer targeting members of a sex trafficking ring, beginning with the staged overdose death of Caleb Easton, son of billionaire Jay Easton.
- The reviewer argues Furious could launch a new TV subgenre — 'the Epstein thriller' — built on plots that, post-Epstein, now read as sickeningly plausible rather than preposterous.
- Furious streams on Disney+.
Why it matters: The reviewer's central claim is that cultural plausibility has shifted: before the Epstein files, a thriller plot about a network of wealthy, institutionally protected predators might have seemed far-fetched, but now reads as a 'grimly realistic' foundation for a new subgenre, giving creators and viewers permission to dramatize such stories as organic rather than lurid.
