What makes a Liz Meriwether series? The showrunner of Furious never seemed like the first choice for a fiery procedural thriller about rape culture given her pedigree as one of the last standing figureheads of the network sitcom. But over the decade since she gave the world New Girl, Meriwether has created a curious back catalog with more shared DNA than one would first assume. Shows like The Dropout and Dying For Sex, like Furious, imbued highly serious circumstances with an off-kilter quality, an intrusion of the goofy amid the dark and gloomy tales of white-collar fraud and terminal cancer. Despite its own bleak subject matter, Furious still manages to be a very funny show, full of oddballs who wouldn’t feel out of place next to Jessica and her roommates. Take away, you know, all of the hell of their lives, and Alice and Catherine would probably feel right at home firing off sardonic quips in New Girl. Unfortunately for them, they’re stuck in Furious. Fortunately for us, they’ve finally come face to face.
Episode six, “They Make A Noise Like Feathers,” opens where the previous episode ended, with Alice spotting Catherine in a sex worker crisis center and stepping into action. This is a rare safe space for Catherine, whose face is now on the evening news and who has never felt less sure in her plans for vengeance. Nora instructs Alice over the phone to “build trust” with Catherine, to win her over to their cause and convince her that there’s hope in becoming a witness against Jay Easton. She has an hour to make it happen before Nora brings in the feds. Is the show going to give us a long-awaited bottle episode, the showdown between cop and crook, who are two sides of the same coin?! Alas, no. Sadly, we don’t get much time at all with the pair, as Furious has several wheels to spin as it crosses the halfway point of the season. But at least we get some great Meriwether moments amid the frenzy.
An all-too-brief scene of Alice in actor mode with Catherine leaves us wanting. We’ve seen Alice lie to win over victims or make witnesses comfortable, but she’s never met someone as ahead of the curve as Catherine, an expert liar with the body count to prove it. It’s in her truths where Alice is most convincing, sharing the details of her own experiences as a victim. Watching Emmy Rossum and Lola Petticrew try to suss one another out, each playing multiple versions of themselves, is certainly worth the weight, even if it feels like some stuff was left on the editing room floor.
Outside of the crisis center, the cops are on the case. Sort of. Alden is stalling for his beloved fiancé by trying to take the fall for murder—the magic of true love—but mostly he’s there to annoy the FBI into submission. Steve Way has a ball as the thorn in the bureau’s side, getting in some real Meriwether-esque zingers and moments of physical comedy with his wheelchair. It’s those bursts of the absurd among the mundane that feel thoroughly of the mind of the New Girl creator. It never feels out of place, which is a credit to the show’s tone management, given the weight of its themes. Laughing while the world burns is always an option.
Many critics have compared the dynamic to that of Villanelle and Eve in Killing Eve, or even Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal: dramas where heroism blurs into villainy as the good guys realize they share more in common with the baddies than they’d like to admit. Furious, though, is more, well, furious. The foundations of Alice and Catherine’s bond are far more precarious than their counterparts, particularly since, as Catherine coldly notes, neither of them will ever truly win.
Alice clings to an increasingly fantastical notion that the FBI and NYPD will remain the good guys and not only bring Easton to justice but allow Catherine to be respected first and foremost as a victim. Nora knows it’s bunk. The moment she tries to get one over her boss, Ed George, by revealing what she knows about his corruption, it backfires immediately because he still holds all the cards in his favor. Her fleeting moment of smugness, played to perfection by Quincey Tyler Bernstine, leaves her hobbled in record time. And what of Alice, who was left out to dry by both the cops and bureau?
Everyone is joking about the nightmarish situation, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Furious is remarkably comfortable with its mordant humor, which is often goofy but organic in its execution. The more we laugh, the sadder everything else seems. Alice and Catherine get that, with both women bound in trauma and their twisted coping mechanisms. In their scant conversations, we saw that in action. Here’s hoping we get more before the finale, because that first meeting was too short for our liking.
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