How Emmy Rossum’s ‘Furious’ Team Found Humanity in Broken Systems

By Grace Kim

Hulu’s Furious premiered on July 27 with three episodes and then released the rest weekly through August 31. Season 1 is now complete on Hulu, and Season 2 has been confirmed.

At Vidiots on October 16, Emmy Rossum, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Steve Way and composer Ariel Marx joined IndieWire and Disney’s “Pass the Remote” screening of Episode 1. The panel and reception examined how they brought Furious to life.

Steve Way commanded the room even though his character, Alden, never appears in the episode they watched. Way said he imagined how he would hassle federal investigators, a question the series answers later.

Rossum, the show’s star and executive producer, said the project began with a retro viewing project several summers earlier. Four years before the panel, she was searching for older films with ideas worth developing into a long-form series.

Her search led to Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow (1987), starring Debra Winger and Theresa Russell. The film evolved from an FBI agent pursuing a female serial killer into a moving relationship between two women.

Rossum brought that idea to creator Elizabeth Meriwether, then to Searchlight and Hulu. Hulu had previously worked with Meriwether on The Dropout, and Rossum said choosing her was an immediate yes.

She credited Meriwether as the show’s mastermind. The partnership produced Hulu’s new hit, which follows Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Alice Black, played by Rossum, as she pursues Catherine, played by Lola Petticrew.

Catherine is a serial killer, but her history complicates the line between perpetrator and victim. The suspense asks whether institutions charged with protecting people can deliver justice.

Rossum’s work in Angelyne had already shown her capacity to make a complicated woman vividly alive. At first, though, an Episode 1 scene in which Alice invites a man inside to fight him made Rossum want to throw the script across the room.

Playing Alice required Rossum to inhabit a woman who could be powerful, repeatedly victimized and drawn to danger as a way of feeling alive. Rossum tied Alice’s disconnection to FBI work, where vulnerability and emotional connection become liabilities.

Composer Ariel Marx joined at the script stage after collaborating with Meriwether on Dying for Sex. He experimented before finished cuts and deadlines narrowed the options. The score began with a jazzier approach, then shed elements until guttural female voices and industrial percussion (machine-like rhythmic textures) defined it.

Meriwether urged Marx to remember Catherine’s full humanity when scoring behavior that might trigger familiar serial-killer cues. That instruction kept the music from reducing Catherine to a conventional thriller threat.

Quincy Tyler Bernstine plays Nora Washington, Alice’s fellow agent. Nora initially hazes Alice, then recognizes something of herself in the younger woman. Bernstine called Nora one of the greatest roles ever written and said the cast felt like family.

Rossum said she knew Bernstine was right for Nora before their chemistry read (a first cast read-through), and the collaboration confirmed it. She praised Bernstine’s bravery, vulnerability and willingness to move between pathos and comedy.

Bernstine’s openness had made her a collaborator of choice for artists including the late Jonathan Demme, director of The Silence of the Lambs. She recalled Demme’s kindness during Rachel Getting Married and the stage production Family Week, which she characterized as beautiful and messy.

On Furious, Rossum remembered watching Bernstine at onset and eagerly anticipating what she had done. Rossum also praised Way’s ability to combine humor with authentic emotion.

That balance matters in material involving trafficking, sexual assault, and violence against women and children.

“Statistically there will be people in this room who have experienced these things firsthand,” Rossum said. “I think it’s incredibly important to have those moments of levity so that we can go to those very real places together.”

Way approached that responsibility through healthcare writing that often makes him angry. He said comedy helps audiences approach difficult ideas with curiosity and grace.

His relationship with Catherine gives Alden a distinct form of recognition: both characters need help from failed systems, and seeking that support becomes radical. Rossum described Alice and Catherine’s connection as a nonsexual love story grounded in mutual recognition.

Audience response supplied its own evidence. Before the screening, about half raised their hands to say they had already seen Furious.

Afterward, fans and guests struggled not to reveal late-season revelations, an endorsement for binge-watching the completed season.

Way received messages from disabled people he had never met, thanking him for Alden, and described the scale of that response as heavy. Before Furious, the performer and comedian had gone three and a half years without a television show. He treated those messages as evidence that the team had done its work.

Meriwether wrote Alden specifically for Way. “She and I together have raised the bar for what it means to have authentic and accurate disability representation on TV,” Way said.

What does ‘Furious’ change for viewers?

For viewers considering the series, it shifts the central question from whether a killer will be caught to whether someone labeled a perpetrator can also be a victim. It asks audiences to distrust not only individual wrongdoing but the institutions that claim to protect people.

It also makes levity and disability part of that moral scrutiny rather than detours from it. The completed first season offers a clear model for handling violence, institutional failure and complicity without flattening them.

With Season 2 confirmed, its test is whether that balance survives another season. The renewal gives the team a chance to extend a standard it has already set for humane characterization, institutional scrutiny and disability representation.