Hulu’s new drama Furious bursts with details, violence, quirkiness, and surprise. The show is willing to dive deeply into the world of sex trafficking and the violent, pathological underbelly of a twisted universe, hiding in plain sight. The themes are familiar, but the nuance and details of this series feel unusual.
And I will admit, I am a little embarrassed by how captivated I became, streaming the show much more quickly than my usual pacing. Why? I wondered.
I think it has something to do with being a therapist and therefore being invited into the private corners of people’s lives—and witnessing just how daunting it is to metabolize violent sexual trauma. All trauma is difficult to metabolize, of course, but sexual abuse is as old as time, happening all around us and habitually ignored. Furious captures its psychological aftermath with an honesty that feels both daunting and real.
Early in his career, Sigmund Freud spent considerable time treating patients diagnosed with what was then called “hysteria.” Rather than simply dismissing their symptoms, he listened closely to their stories. In 1896, Freud presented a paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” arguing that traumatic sexual experiences in childhood were at the root of the psychological symptoms he was encountering in many of his patients.
The idea was bold and unsettling and was met with considerable skepticism from his medical colleagues. Freud ultimately retreated from what became known as his “seduction theory,” and his reasons for doing so remain a subject of debate. But more than a century later, there is something startlingly contemporary about this chapter of Freud’s history: the profound difficulty we can have believing, looking directly at, and honestly facing accounts of sexual trauma.
In Furious, creator Elizabeth Meriwether and actor and executive producer Emmy Rossum enter similarly uncomfortable territory. They challenge our assumptions about emotional unwellness by asking us not simply to look at troubling behavior, but to consider what might lie underneath it.
By the first episode, it is clear that Furious is not really a whodunit crime drama. It is a rich, deep, complicated exploration of the residual impact of post-traumatic stress and the unpredictable shapes and forms it can take.
This becomes most profound in the quiet corners of the lives of its two female leads—the detective (Alice) and the fugitive (Catherine). The series gives us two women whose lives have been shaped by trauma without reducing either woman to her trauma. Their histories emerge in fragments, in behavior, in relationships, and sometimes in what they cannot fully remember or say.
And this is where Rossum’s performance becomes extraordinary.
Some of the most affecting moments happen when Alice is completely alone. We watch her shake. We watch her hold herself, as though her body is struggling and starving for a basic level of human containment that others seem to possess so naturally. There is no speech that explains what she is feeling and no tidy revelation that tells the viewer how to understand her. Rossum simply allows us to witness what trauma can look like when nobody else is watching. (Several moments when Catherine is alone are equally moving. Especially the one with the retainer and the backpack, giving viewers an unforgettable window into the character’s longing and childhood loss.)
As a therapist, I found these scenes particularly moving. Trauma is not only something we remember or something we talk about. It can live in the body, surfacing in moments that seem disconnected from the original experience and sometimes beyond the reach of language.
And then there is the scene with Alice’s half-sister after Alice leaves the hospital. Her sister offers her pears, and Alice finally explains why she does not want them. It is such a small, domestic exchange—and precisely because of that, it captures something enormous. It’s easy to understand Alice’s unlikability. The past attaches itself to an ordinary domestic object. A pear is no longer simply a pear.
Rossum does not overplay the moment. Alice does not suddenly become a different person because she has disclosed something painful. Instead, we watch one human being allow another human being slightly closer to an experience she has largely carried alone.
This is part of what Furious understands and conveys so well about trauma. Its aftermath does not necessarily announce itself. We often encounter it indirectly: in the relationship that cannot quite feel safe, the reaction that seems disproportionate, the person who appears difficult, unreachable, or off, or even in the refusal of something as ordinary as a piece of fruit. Behavior that makes little sense in isolation becomes profoundly understandable once we know more of the story.
It is interesting trying to imagine Freud interviewing and struggling to understand someone like Catherine or even Alice — more than a century ago. And part of what Furious gets so right is relational; before asking what is wrong with someone, we might need to understand what happened to them and what they have had to do in order to survive it.
And this is why Emmy Rossum deserves an Emmy. Her performance does not simply show us a traumatized woman. She gives us something much more complicated and real: a woman living a robust life while carrying trauma within it. Alice can be capable and careless, connected and isolated, powerful and profoundly weak. None of these qualities cancels out the others.
Rossum lets us see them all.
Viewer discretion is advised, and the show posts important information to support viewers who may find the show profoundly meaningful and also triggering.
