Welcome back to The Work, a column about resistance in fiction. This time: Furious, the Hulu series from creator Elizabeth Meriwether.
Furious never tells you what happened to Nora Washington. The Hulu series just gives you the basics: The FBI agent is head of the sex crimes unit, located in the basement of the Bureau's New York City office, a claustrophobic cluster of cubicles and windowless rooms where some of the most heinous crimes are investigated, examined, and rarely closed. Furious isn't really about Nora Washington, at least, not on its face. Elizabeth Meriwether's crime thriller is – like Black Widow, the 1987 film it's inspired by – centered on the cat-and-mouse game between a female serial killer and the fed, FBI agent Alice Black, determined to catch her. In this game, Nora Washington is a supporting player, the experienced mentor to the troubled new agent Alice as she hunts the killer Catherine Grace. But in Nora’s thousand-yard stare, withering wit, and unassuming slouch, you come to learn that she is Furious, that the show's thesis lives in her bones, and every once in a while, she lets other characters get a glimpse of it.
Played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Nora Washington is immediately one of the great TV characters, one whose every line of dialogue – the funny ones and the cutting ones – carries the horrible weight of experience, the hint of a rich and difficult story we'll never see. What we do see, though, is her assured statement of the show's thesis.
When Furious begins, Catherine (Lola Petticrew) has murdered the son of a very wealthy and powerful man, and agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) – refusing to settle for easy answers on a case that her colleagues in both the FBI and NYPD are eager to close — begins to suspect that the murder is connected to a ring of child sex traffickers who have eluded justice, because men have looked the other way. At the conclusion of the first episode, as Alice sits beside the hospital bed of an informant she imperiled, Nora joins her and delivers a monologue articulating the thorny, daring ground the series will tread in the remaining six episodes. She tells Alice about Medusa.
"The god of the ocean rapes her in Athena's temple, but Athena decides that's Medusa's fault and turns all her beautiful golden hair into snakes. She's a victim, but it doesn't make her a good person. It turns her into a monster," Nora says. She finds this a useful metaphor for the problem women pose when they become killers. The criminal act is troubling, sure, but perhaps more so is the way that a woman killing upsets the patriarchal balance of power and our cultural understanding of victims and perpetrators, because in Nora's experience women who become murderers were victims first. Deep down in the pits of the sex crimes unit, where no careers are made and her more comfortable colleagues with promotions have long since forgotten her, she's learned something no one wants to acknowledge – that victims of violence don't stop at being victims. If they survive, they can evolve, become more calculating, Nora says. And some of them kill.
"That's the world that makes sense: women are supposed to be hit, and raped, and go away and die quietly, not start murdering people," Nora continues. "Everyone likes it when there's a sweet little woman, lying on the floor naked and cut up in pieces."
Nora's monologue is wonderfully meaty, putting forth challenging and messy ideas about popular perceptions of victimhood and how they are flattened in our cultural understanding. These images are conveyed and reinforced in part by crime thrillers like the ones Furious stands opposed to, shows like True Detective or Hannibal that feature women's bodies carved up in a tableau. Her speech also lays out the awful, soul-killing nihilism that can come with seeking justice for women who are victims of sexual violence in a patriarchal society. "It doesn't matter," Nora says of the suspects for whom criminal cases actually stick. "The ones who are really to blame don't get caught. You think you're ever going to catch anyone who matters?"
Across its eight-episode first season, Furious uses its serial killer hunt to cut a vindictive path through the elaborate network of protection abusive men construct to keep themselves in power, a web of mutually assured destruction. Catherine, it's revealed, is a victim of sex trafficking, and is hunting down the men who abused her and made that trafficking possible. In Alice’s hunt for Catherine, Alice must wrestle with knowing that Catherine's targets deserve to face justice, and that what she can actually do as a federal agent is severely limited. A survivor of abuse herself, there is also a part of her that is seduced by Catherine's vigilantism; a major tension of the show is how sympathetic she will be to Catherine when they do finally collide.
This October will mark nine years since The New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published their massive exposé documenting decades of alleged sexual harassment from Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Their shocking reports kicked off the modern #MeToo movement, triggering a national reckoning that, for a time, seemed to make real progress, as men in positions of power faced consequences for sexism and abuse that was all but endemic to American life. After Donald Trump's return to power in 2024, however, that progress has been imperiled and in danger of being snuffed out, as the Trump administration fosters a culture of vice signaling that rewards men who behave badly.
For a moment, there was a breach in the firewall these men built around themselves and their systemic abuse, but now? Consequences seem temporary, as "canceled" comedians get glossy new specials, writers with extensive allegations of sexual misconduct return to their publishers, and actors and musicians accused of seemingly career-killing offenses are now being welcomed back.
It's this knowledge that gives Nora's monologue its edge, and simmers throughout all of Furious. Every day it is made clear that for the elite, sexual violence isn't just ignored, it is sanctioned – something that has always been apparent for those who care to look, and is now horribly clear in a post-Epstein world. This is the most gutting aspect of Furious' various character studies: The only people with the drive to do something about sexual violence are the people who have suffered most from it. There is no collective will to expel this evil from daily life, just a fear that any power and status anyone has achieved may be somehow implicated in it. Nora knows she has a dead-end job, that her days spent on cases no one cares about and that looking for clues in horrid CSAM has cost her a portion of her soul and left her with a permanent fury, as Alice and Catherine, in their own ways, also seek collective restitution for the wrongs committed against them.
So no, we never do learn what happened to Nora Washington. But in her grim work, she observes new Nora Washingtons begin their angry path every day, new Alice Blacks, new Catherines, new Jane Does who go missing or end up dead, never getting the chance to be pissed at the world that failed them. She numbs her mind with alcohol because she sees all this everywhere, and you likely do, too. But you don't have to suffer from evil to abhor it. You just have to give a shit.
