Furious, the first season of which finished on Hulu in late August, made me pay close attention to its characters’ eyes. They may not be a window into the soul, but they offer a glimpse into the incandescent anger that propels most of the main characters. On several occasions, the camera lingers on a close-up of FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) as she contemplates whether, this time, she can face getting in the shower—the place where, for years, beatings from her former boyfriend and fellow cop (Jake Lacy) often began. In episode four of eight, it cuts to Sex Crimes Unit head Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) staring straight ahead in stony silence as she listens to her boss and betrayer Ed George (Danny McCarthy) lecturing about self-care and mental health. And in episode two, to Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew) as she whispers a semi-ironic thank-you in the ear of a man she’s about to kill, for having given her a glass of water after he sexually assaulted her when she was a trafficked teen over a decade earlier.

This triptych of women with their buried emotions and choked rage anchor the show, created by Elizabeth Meriwether (who also created New Girl and The Dropout) as an exploration of and fictional catharsis for all the ways in which misogyny runs rampant in real-life society. The daily horrors of living through the second Trump administration are a cruel reminder that, outside of television, justice is a pipe dream, bad men are rarely punished, that anyone who isn’t a cisgender, heterosexual white man has no place in society—and even that place requires relentless adherence to an aggressive, dominating, meat-eating, steroid-enhanced ideal of supposed masculinity.

Furious, the first season of which finished on Hulu in late August, made me pay close attention to its characters’ eyes. They may not be a window into the soul, but they offer a glimpse into the incandescent anger that propels most of the main characters. On several occasions, the camera lingers on a close-up of FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) as she contemplates whether, this time, she can face getting in the shower—the place where, for years, beatings from her former boyfriend and fellow cop (Jake Lacy) often began. In episode four of eight, it cuts to Sex Crimes Unit head Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) staring straight ahead in stony silence as she listens to her boss and betrayer Ed George (Danny McCarthy) lecturing about self-care and mental health. And in episode two, to Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew) as she whispers a semi-ironic thank-you in the ear of a man........

© Foreign Policy