Furious Review: A Guilty Pleasure Masquerading as Prestige TV
Furious, Hulu’s newest streaming hit, is one of those shows where there are some clear pluses and minuses when you reflect on it. It’s also the sort of program where the more you think about it, the less sense aspects of it make, and the worse the show seems overall. Furious can perhaps best be described as a guilty pleasure show masquerading as prestige TV.
That’s not to say that I think Furious is an awful show. It’s not. In fact, I believe Furious is a totally fine yet not at all special or unique viewing experience. It is, however, a show that, after the first couple of episodes, I thought was going to end up being far better than it ultimately was. Furious gets more outlandish as its story progresses.
Furious is certainly a well-made show. Nothing about the way the show is shot would lead anyone to believe that it’s anything other than top-quality. The pacing is pretty good, and I never felt bored or that the series had been unjustly stretched out to cover an eight-episode run.
The biggest strength of Furious is probably its acting. Everyone does a solid job and, though I definitely have some serious questions about the believability of a lot of the characters (many of whom feel like caricatures of real people or feel like tropes), the cast does a quality job with the material they’ve been given.
Emmy Rossum plays Alice Black, and she’s the best part of the show. Her character is given a lot of backstory and she’s able to shape that into a really intriguing, emotional performance.
Lola Petticrew plays the other main character, serial killer Catherine Grace. She does a fine job with the role. However, the believability of her character, who is a five-foot tall, super-petite woman who continuously overpowers (and outwits, too) her male victims, is far from realistic. Catherine also has a seemingly endless supply of fentanyl to drug her victims. This is attempted to be explained away with a line later on, but I still highly doubt she’d be able to get her hands on so much of such a highly controlled substance so easily.
Many of my problems with the show have to do with how unrealistic events feel later on. Characters just seem to end up exactly where they need to be, despite how far-fetched it is. When the show’s creators need Alice and Catherine to be in the same room together for the purposes of story progression, it simply works out. When they need Alice’s abusive ex-boyfriend to show up at a specific moment, he’s there too. A lot of Furious feels like lazy writing.
Furious seems to be a show that was made simply to appeal to a large number of people. I recently watched The Agency, which is an excellent spy series. That’s the sort of program where you actually have to pay attention to what’s happening on screen (no multi-screen viewing for that one), and Furious is the opposite of that. It’s super easy to follow. Also, even though most viewers will be able to easily predict what’s going to happen, there’s something about that aspect of a show that almost makes it an easier, more familiar watch.
Furious has a couple of interesting nuggets of ideas about the power of rage, vengeance, and abuse, but it fails to really explore them in a truly compelling manner. It ends up being a sort of okay, unrealistic, serial killer crime show with mostly clichéd characters (but good acting). That doesn’t mean Furious isn’t a show worth checking out. It’s mostly entertaining, but far from great.
Grade: 6/10