New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether doing a Hulu thriller loosely inspired by a late-’80s neo-noir is only surprising if you haven’t been following Meriwether’s career since the end of her breakout sitcom. Sure, her immediate followups were network comedies in the New Girl mold, but after those came the Emmy-winning Elizabeth Holmes biodrama The Dropout and the laugh-’til-you-cry/cry-’til-you-laugh FX miniseries Dying For Sex. And now comes Furious, a cat-and-mouse game between FBI novice Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) and vigilante serial killer Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew) that is often as funny and ripped-from-the-headlines relevant as it is suspenseful. Ahead of the series’ July 27 premiere, Meriwether spoke to The A.V. Club about adding yet another genre to her TV résumé, how to tell jokes without undercutting the drama of Alice and Catherine’s parallel crusades, and why she wanted to tell such an angry story despite her own personal aversion to confrontation.
The A.V. Club: What was your relationship with the crime-thriller genre ahead of Furious?
Elizabeth Meriwether: Well, it’s interesting because I’ve obviously never written a crime thriller. But I would go home from the New Girl writers’ room and just watch them because that was how I relaxed—watching a dark British murder drama. So I do love them, and I’ve watched so many over the years. I sort of naively thought, “Oh, I can write one,” and then I got into writing [Furious] and I was like, “Wow, this is really hard.” But I do love trying new things.
My way into being able to write a thriller is just character—just digging into the human beings behind all of it. I found myself gravitating away from the cool computers at the FBI and stuff like that because it’s not my sweet spot. The reason I love those shows is because they have characters at these really extreme points in their lives and it’s just a chance to dig into raw, weird psychology. That was what I jumped into with this show.
AVC: I hadn’t even thought of the show’s lack of a “guy in the chair.” It’s a lot of, as Quincy Tyler Bernstine’s Furious character calls it, “brickwork.”
LM: A lot of it came from actually speaking to FBI agents and people in law enforcement. I didn’t want to go into the sort of “snake eating its tail” thing where a TV writer is writing based on other TV that they’ve seen, so I actually spoke to a lot of people—and especially women in law enforcement. They were really funny. They were really, like, gallows humor, even to a point where I was a little bit like, “Whoa.” And that’s hard—I was in a writer’s room for years and I’m pretty hard to shock.
The humanness of what they do, I think, really struck me. I spoke to an NYPD homicide detective, and he said, “What I do is I try to just listen. I try to sit there and let somebody talk and get comfortable and I listen to what they’re saying.” And that led to Danny, Scoot McNairy’s character, saying, “I walk, I don’t run. I listen.” And I think with these kinds of shows, a lot of it is very aggressive and in your face, and I was interested in the part of law enforcement that is human beings trying to find justice for other human beings in very flawed systems. But full of twists and turns! [Laughs.]
AVC: It seems like a difficult tone to manage. The story has all these lurid elements, but you don’t want to sensationalize them. You want to reflect the humor of the people you spoke to, but you don’t want to trivialize the subject matter. How did you approach that?
LM: I love a difficult tone. [Laughs.] I keep going there.
I spoke to a trafficking victim. I spoke to social workers. I spoke to a lot of people. I wanted to be as faithful to the experiences that I was hearing about, instead of coming in with my own assumptions and my own sense of drama and what I feel like will play really well. In episode six, there’s a B-story where one of the FBI agents, her whole arc in the episode is just getting upstairs to see her boss. She’s stalling and taking her time to get upstairs, and that came from a conversation with an FBI agent where she was like, “Listen: I would have to tell my boss, but I would take a long time to get up there.” And that’s so funny and interesting and not something that you would see usually [on TV]. I like to start from a real place. And I think that protects against some of the sensationalizing. It goes to very surprising dramatic places, but I try to keep it grounded in some kind of really real human experience.
AVC: Where did the idea to populate the supporting cast with so many comedic performers come from? In Catherine’s storyline alone, you’ve got Rob Delaney, Chloe Troast, and Steve Way. LM: I mean, I love comedy and I love comedy actors because I feel like they’re so quick and flexible and they can just really roll with it. And I did feel like there was so much comedy from these law enforcement agents coming at me that I was like, “I have to include this to show how these people are coping with the job that they have.” And also, the mundane human politics of any bureaucracy, I think, is really funny. It’s the FBI and they’re dealing with such big dramatic cases, but, at the end of the day, there’s an HR person and there’s mental health seminars and there’s elevators and it’s just people trying to work together to do something, which is always gonna end up in comedic places.
I did a panel with Steve for Dying For Sex, which was about caretaking and showing caretaking on screen. And he was so funny. He was just cracking me up the entire time and I was in the writer’s room for Furious and I was like, “This person that Catherine is a nurse for—it has to be Steve.” So we just wrote it for him.
That was an incredible collaboration with Steve. We spoke after the table reads, where he would give me his feedback and be so generous with these really specific feelings that he has. He would give me all these, like, mechanics of his wheelchair to understand how to do the physical comedy with him. You wouldn’t normally think of Steve doing physical comedy, but he’s so funny and so good at slapstick. And it was all through his obviously intimate understanding of his wheelchair and how it moves and how it can secretly move. It was such a joy working with him and finding that.
And I do think with this kind of material, you need that release of a comedy moment. It gets the audience in a place where they can hear more and experience more intense things, because you’ve given them a little respite. And it’s also more like life. Things are funny and then they’re tragic almost in the same breath.
AVC: I felt it pulling me deeper into the show because it wasn’t just one dire tragedy after another. I mean, it gets dark…
EM: …but hopefully in ways that make you think. I never wanted it to be dark for dark’s sake. If it’s gonna get to those places, hopefully you’re earning it by the time you get there and you’re understanding how we got there and why. I always want to show the path forward a little bit, too—explore what it looks like after the darkness.
I think that’s a big part of Alice and Catherine’s story. They’re both on that twin trajectory of trying to figure out how to move on from all of these terrible things that have happened to them. And they’ve made different choices and I think their proximity and that collision path that they’re on towards each other forces them both to question the choices that they’ve made.
A writer I know read the pilot script early on, and he was like, “Oh, Catherine is so trapped.” And I was like, “That’s such an interesting idea”—of somebody who is trapped by their own anger. You do root for her on a certain level, but the choices she’s making are very painful because they’re ultimately gonna hurt her and take away her humanity. There’s a lot of complication—the idea of getting revenge is not actually something that’s gonna feel good in the end [Laughs.] or it’s not necessarily gonna be the answer. But it’s also worth exploring how it feels and why you would get there.
AVC: This is a show that’s driven by so many different sides—and so many different kinds—of anger. What was it about that emotion that made you want to explore it through a story like this?
LM: I am not a confrontational person. I’ve definitely used humor to deflect a lot of feelings that I’ve had—like I’m not comfortable being angry. So I think this show, as an exploration of what it feels like to let yourself get angry, is interesting. And then also, what are some of the dangers of living in anger all the time? It both is a necessary step, but also not the endpoint, I think, ultimately. There’s a lot of anger in the world right now, I think—for women in particular. This show is not saying “That is the answer to everything,” but it is saying, “That exists, and let’s look at it and look at how it works and how it feels and how it functions.”
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