As IP plays go, Hulu's new crime thriller Furious is going for a real deep cut. The series, which began streaming yesterday, is a loose adaptation of Black Widow, a 1987 film starring Theresa Russell as a serial killer who keeps marrying wealthy men and then murdering them for their money, and Debra Winger as the FBI agent obsessed with catching her. The movie was a very modest success at the box office, but Winger and Russell's career profiles both dipped substantially once the Eighties turned into the Nineties, and the title is now associated in pop culture circles with the Avenger played by Scarlett Johansson.
So Furious clearly wasn't designed with the assumption of a huge flood of viewership from people nostalgic for the Russell/Winger version, and/or viewers who had grown up hearing about it. Someone wanted to remake Black Widow because they had a clear creative vision for how to update the material for the present day. And that someone is [checks notes]... New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether?
Now, Meriwether has branched out significantly over the last few years. Her 2022 Elizabeth Holmes miniseries, The Dropout, was one of the few genuinely good examples of that Covid-era trend of movie star-laden prestige limited series based on real-life scammers. And her 2025 adaptation of the podcast Dying for Sex, starring Michelle Williams as a woman with Stage Four cancer trying to find sexual fulfillment in her final days, was fantastic. If Furious — starring Emmy Rossum as the FBI agent, Alice Black, and Lola Petticrew as the serial killer, Catherine Grace — might seem far afield from the writer who gave us Jess, Nick, Schmidt, Winston, and Cece, it's much more in line with the kind of thing she's done lately.
Meriwether's take on this half-forgotten source material has its highs and lows, but those highs include terrific showcases for Rossum, Petticrew, and several other actors, and a lot of thought-provoking material about sex, gender, and abuse, particularly when law-enforcement gets involved in any or all of these things. It's not always an easy watch, but the highs are very high.