{"id":2122,"date":"2026-08-18T13:13:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=2122"},"modified":"2026-08-18T13:13:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:13:35","slug":"a-time-for-female-monsters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=2122","title":{"rendered":"A Time for Female Monsters"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Most dramas about murderous women save the revelations of deviance for the end, after parceling out uncertainty and complication. Furious<\/i> does things exactly backwards. Here is a monster<\/i>, the Hulu series announces with its very first scene, during which an unblinking blonde in a Halloween cat mask kills a man by forcibly injecting him with fentanyl, which she keeps in a bedazzled silver tin. \u201cI don\u2019t really like listening to you,\u201d she whispers, as he gasps for breath. \u201cI don\u2019t like the sounds you\u2019re making. But I love your smile.\u201d After he dies, she reaches for a bowl of candy corn, which she eats slowly and with care, piece by piece.<\/p>\n

Read more Alan Dershowitz Won\u2019t Forget What Larry David Did to Him<\/a><\/p>\n

The scene felt confrontational to me at first watch, as though it were daring me to switch it off in discomfort. But why? Crime shows begin with violated women all the time\u2014the naked, bloodied female corpse is such a staple in the genre\u2019s visual language that viewers hardly notice it. Why is a scene of a young woman luxuriating in her sadistic treatment of a man so unsettling? As Furious<\/i> goes on, it offers up more murders, but also more context for why this woman, Catherine (played by Lola Petticrew), is doing what she\u2019s doing\u2014and although she remains monstrous, the show shades in her full, horrifying humanity.<\/p>\n

Furious<\/i>\u2014created by the writer Liz Meriwether and executive-produced by the actor Emmy Rossum, who also stars in it\u2014is preoccupied with elemental ideas about violence and transformation, which juxtapose nicely with the more conventional framework of a police procedural. Rossum plays Alice, a former detective turned FBI grunt who\u2019s dragged into investigating Catherine\u2019s latest victim by her former partner Danny (Scoot McNairy). Like Catherine, Alice has been warped by trauma; her previous boyfriend, also a police officer (Jake Lacy), beat her, and all of her colleagues except Danny froze her out when she finally reported him. She uses apps to find sexual partners who will agree to beat her, role-playing her own abuse. In one episode, she outright refuses to shower, a tendency that seems off-putting until her sister reveals to Danny that her ex used to drag her from the shower to hit her, sometimes leaving her passed out under the running water.<\/p>\n

Early on, the show evokes Medusa\u2014whose rape at the hands of Poseidon saw her turned into a hideous Gorgon with snakes for hair\u2014in reference to Catherine, whose own history is at least as cruel; there are also multiple references to the Furies, winged goddesses of retribution. Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), who runs the FBI sex-crimes division that Alice is trying to get assigned to, describes the room that agents use to review child-sexual-abuse material as \u201cthe darkest pit of Hades down deep in the bottom of the Earth.\u201d Washington\u2019s perpetual rage, and her attempts to quash it with emotional detachment and tequila, suffuses every scene she\u2019s in.<\/p>\n

Watching the show, I remembered the moment, almost a decade ago, when women\u2019s anger became the subject of countless books and news stories\u2014when many people expressed hope that it might have a revolutionary power. Instead, during a period when women have lost fundamental rights and have been confronted with the apparent futility of their protests, cultural narratives about women\u2019s rage no longer have the luxury of optimism. Instead, anger has metastasized into vengeance, inflamed and out for blood.<\/p>\n

While watching Furious<\/i>, I happened to read Honey<\/i>, by Imani Thompson: a wry and erudite take on the dark-academia genre about a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge named Yrsa (derived from an Old Norse word for \u201cfurious\u201d) who\u2014almost accidentally\u2014becomes a serial killer. Yrsa\u2019s journey toward murder begins casually one day, when she tips a bee into the lemonade of an older male colleague who has betrayed Yrsa\u2019s friend and stolen credit for the research project they were working on together. When the bee stings the man, who\u2019s allergic to them, Yrsa watches while he chokes to death, observing \u201cthe theatrics of the wheezing man. The red-hot raspberry of his face.\u201d When he falls to the ground, she gets onto her knees and strokes his hair. Afterward, she eats ice cream. Murder in the book becomes associated with sweetness and satiation. In dull moments after the man\u2019s death, Yrsa replays the scene in her mind, and it fills her up.<\/p>\n

Thompson wanted to write about a female serial killer, she said in one interview, because \u201cwe always see the woman as a victim,\u201d in ways that are often glamorized. But Yrsa is also working on a Ph.D. about \u201cAfropessimism and Black women\u2019s discourses on their liberation,\u201d and the book is studded with references to academics and writers who consider the heritage of violence. Yrsa often uses critical theory to try to justify what she\u2019s doing: She cites thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Stuart Hall, and Saidiya Hartman, and fixates particularly on Hartman\u2019s essay Venus in Two Acts<\/i>, about all of the nameless murdered Black girls obliterated by history. How, Hartman wonders, can she \u201crevisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?\u201d In Yrsa\u2019s mind, this question becomes twisted into the idea that punishing abusive men might redress some of the imbalance.<\/p>\n

Read more Islamophobia Has Corroded American Values<\/a><\/p>\n

Yrsa does so in part by tracking down men outed on a site where sex workers name their most vicious clients. She injects one with a fatal dose of heroin and enjoys doing it, much like Catherine, savoring the memory of \u201cthat moment when she realized he was vulnerable only to her. That moment when she could do anything.\u201d Late in Furious<\/i>, Catherine tells Alice about how her brutal actions feel to her: \u201cIt\u2019s power, watching someone die.\u201d She adds, \u201cWhen I\u2019m killing someone, it\u2019s like I\u2019m eating him, like I\u2019m swallowing him, like everything he\u2019s ever done is disappearing inside me.\u201d She is, it turns out, pursuing and murdering the men who hurt her when she was an underage teenager being trafficked for sex, starting with the pimp who beat, raped, and starved her. Her pleasure in killing, unlike Yrsa\u2019s, is derived not from the act itself but from neutralizing what these men did to her.<\/p>\n

The show is a fascinating pivot for Meriwether, who previously created the beloved offbeat Fox comedy New Girl<\/i> and who most recently co-created the FX series Dying for Sex<\/i>, about a woman who receives a fatal cancer diagnosis and decides to pursue sexual pleasure in her final months. There are moments in Furious<\/i> that come off as morbidly comic\u2014an FBI agent played by Rob Yang shouts \u201cBoom!\u201d at inopportune moments, and a witness with muscular dystrophy (Steve Way) needles police officers with his wheelchair\u2014but more often, the series is pitch-dark. The show was shot with anamorphic lenses to foster a moody, surveillant feeling, evoking David Fincher more than Law & Order: Special Victims Unit<\/i>.The point seems to be to use the visual language of neo-noir while shifting the focus to characters who don\u2019t usually draw the camera\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

Furious<\/i> has been referred to as a \u201ccrime drama for a post-Epstein world,\u201d and one of the characters\u2014a billionaire with similar proclivities who seems to operate with impunity\u2014seems modeled after the serial sex offender. \u201cThe ones who are really to blame don\u2019t get caught, never, never,\u201d Nora tells Alice. \u201cYou think you\u2019re ever gonna catch anyone who matters?\u201d But Meriwether, in an interview with Vulture<\/i>,noted that she was \u201cmuch more interested in the experience of the women than I am with the experience of the perpetrator,\u201d and the show is especially curious regarding women who become compelled to victimize others. What does living with that kind of trauma and injustice do to a person\u2019s psyche? \u201cMy memory sucks<\/i>,\u201d Catherine says in one scene, trying to piece together fragments of her past life into a coherent shape. \u201cIt\u2019s \u2019cause I got strangled so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

The actors in Furious<\/i> are uniformly brilliant: Bernstine\u2019s achingly blas\u00e9 Nora; McNairy\u2019s frowsy, compassionate Danny; Rossum\u2019s magnetic and volatile Alice. Petticrew turns Catherine\u2019s postured immaturity into something vividly repulsive\u2014she\u2019s constantly restaging the girlhood she never got to have, but in an unavoidably corrupted way. By the show\u2019s end, we can better understand her, even if we\u2019re lucky enough not to have her tolerance for cruelty. What happens to anger when it can\u2019t be absorbed? We can only consider whether there\u2019s truth in Nora\u2019s assertion that only evil can really fight evil, and that in order to defend humanity, you occasionally have to sacrifice your own.<\/p>\n

\u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/small><\/em>The Atlantic<\/small>.<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Trump Is Putting His Face On Everything<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The crime drama of the year is all about anger that has metastasized into something darker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nA Time for Female Monsters - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=2122\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Time for Female Monsters - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The crime drama of the year is all about anger that has metastasized into something darker.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=2122\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-18T13:13:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2122#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2122\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"A Time for Female Monsters\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-18T13:13:35+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2122\"},\"wordCount\":1517,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2122#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/b3e236823ee16368a76782bf304a08dd.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Culture\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2122#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2122\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2122\",\"name\":\"A Time for Female Monsters - 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