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Hulu’s Furious is a stylish crime series that follows FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) as she becomes entangled with a charismatic serial killer (Lola Petticrew), leading to an increasingly deadly game of cat and mouse. The series comes from creator and showrunner Liz Meriwether. But while the story is entirely its own, its origins can be traced back to an unexpected moment from a slightly forgotten 1987 thriller.
The film Black Widow is a stylish neo-noir thriller that follows Catherine Petersen (Theresa Russell), a serial killer who marries wealthy older men, poisons them, and inherits their fortunes. Justice Department agent Alexandra Barnes (Debra Winger) uncovers the scheme and becomes locked in an increasingly obsessive game of cat-and-mouse to bring her to justice. Anyone who loves good neo-noir with sapphic undertones, or who happened to have HBO in the 1980s and caught it during one of its seemingly hundreds of repeat airings, probably knows the film well.
According to showrunner Liz Meriwether, the film influenced her creation of the show Furious. Specifically, it was a single, unexpected scene that sparked the idea for the series. Talking to TV Insider, she explained how Black Widow inspired the creation of Furious, and the benefits of a TV series versus a film.
“It’s a movie, not a TV show. It doesn’t really go in [on the characters]. It doesn’t have the time or the space to sort of like really dig into the character’s psychology, and it doesn’t really seem as interested in that in a cool way,” said Liz Meriwether to TV Insider. “But it has this weird moment, like towards the end, where the serial killer and the FBI agent are just hanging out on the beach for a while.”
“I feel like I was really drawn to that kind of [scene],” explained Meriwether. “These two women who find each other and kind of just have a moment of connection in the middle of a really twisty cat-and-mouse thriller movie that is actually just about like two women becoming friends, which I felt like was really interesting.”
“Going into making and adapting it for TV, I knew that I had to find a character arc for a serial killer and a character arc for an FBI agent that goes much deeper into how they got to where they got to, and where and why they’re sort of doing what they’re doing,” she explained. “And that was really fun.”
“I think to adapt a movie that already exists, there has to be something that you want to do differently. Like you want to go a little bit in a different direction or go deeper,” said Meriwether. “This is not just a recreation of that movie, for sure.”
Furious, Series Premiere, July 27, Hulu
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