Furious on Hulu: Cast, Episode Recaps and Review (2026)

Furious arrived on Hulu on 27 July 2026 with three episodes at once, and it is the rare serial-killer show where the killer’s logic is the point rather than the puzzle. Created by Elizabeth Meriwether, it takes the 1987 film Black Widow as its starting point: a woman who kills, and a woman whose job is to find her.

This guide covers what happens in the three episodes released so far, who everyone is, when the rest arrive, and whether it is worth starting now.

⚠️ Spoilers for episodes 1–3 from here.

What is Furious about?

An FBI agent and a serial killer working the same wound from opposite sides.

Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) is a former NYPD homicide detective now on the bottom rung of the FBI as a probationary duty agent, which in practice means the tip line — taking calls while colleagues laugh at them. Catherine (Lola Petticrew) is a trafficking survivor who is killing men tied to the abuse she went through as a child, staging each death as an overdose. She also kills outside that pattern, when someone gets close enough to be a threat.

The series does not withhold the killer’s identity from the audience. We watch her choose targets, build covers and get into their homes, and the tension comes from Alice reconstructing what we have already seen. Both women have been failed by the same institutions, and the show is explicit that this is the connection between them.

When do new Furious episodes come out?

Weekly on Mondays, through 31 August 2026.

Hulu released the first three episodes together on 27 July, then moved to one a week. Episodes run roughly 50 to 55 minutes; listed runtimes vary by a minute or two between platforms.

Episodes 4 and 5 have titles but have not been released. Neither Hulu nor Disney+ has listed runtimes for them, or titles for the final three.

What happens in Furious episodes 1–3?

Three episodes in, the case has moved from “is this even a murder” to “who was the girl in the photograph”.

Episode 1: The Gorgon

Alice links two deaths written off as overdoses and becomes certain they are the same killer’s work — which is not the same as being able to prove it.

The body is Caleb Easton, son of billionaire Jay Easton. Everything reads as an accident until Alice looks properly: the needle marks are too neat, there are lacerations on the fingernails, and the bathroom has been freshly bleached. Nobody cleans a bathroom that thoroughly before dying.

She pulls a second case with the same signature — Adrian Murado, a former dealer, dead the same way, with the same scratches and the same unhelpfully described girlfriend, whose face nobody can recall because she wore a mask. Alice’s boss Mason Adkins does not want a serial-killer theory. Nora Washington, who runs the sex crimes unit, is the one who eventually gives her something to work with, and Danny Kelly, her former NYPD partner, works it from the outside.

The episode’s identifying detail is a red poppy tattoo. Alice finds it on bodega surveillance footage, on a young woman avoiding Murado, and it matches what a witness described. By the closing scene the same woman is in the bed of a lawyer named Oliver Charles, and the tattoo is visible on her hip.

Written by Elizabeth Meriwether, directed by Brian Kirk.

Episode 2: My Life Had Stood – a Loaded Gun

The killing we watch this week has a witness nobody planned for.

Catherine, working under an assumed name as a catering waitress, is in Oliver Charles’s penthouse the morning after the party. He hands her an NDA, which she reads with amusement. Then she drugs him — not fatally, not yet — and he spends most of the episode conscious and immobilised while she moves around his apartment as though she lives there.

What she has not planned for is Mira, Oliver’s teenage daughter, arriving in the city for a debate tournament. Catherine tells her that her father is unwell and in bed, and the two of them spend the afternoon together. The scene the episode is built around is a girl eating dinner in the kitchen while her father lies paralysed in the next room and the woman who put him there cooks.

Oliver dies. Before he does, Catherine tells him what he is being killed for: he paid to have sex with her when she was underage. Mira is not physically harmed — the episode is careful that this is not the same as leaving her unhurt.

The series fills Alice in across these first two episodes. She left the NYPD after an abusive relationship with a detective, Marshall Connelly, that put her in hospital. She told her lieutenant, and, in her own account of it, everyone she had worked with and grown up with stopped speaking to her. She was the one who left. Danny’s version of the same events is quieter and just as damning: when the lieutenant asked him why Alice had missed those few days of work, he told him the truth, that it was Marshall’s fault — and he has been on a desk ever since.

It ends with the building superintendent letting himself in and finding Oliver dead — and Mira on the floor at the foot of the bed, scissors in her hands, her hair cut short.

Written by Elizabeth Meriwether, directed by Brian Kirk.

Episode 3: Memory Distortion

The case gets its real subject, and Alice is made to work it beside her abuser.

A joint FBI–NYPD task force is stood up, and the NYPD homicide detective assigned to Oliver Charles’s murder is Marshall. Alice, whose credibility built this case, now has to sit across from the man the department protected. An agent named Choi talks over her and pushes the obvious lead — the name the suspect gave at a shelter and a catering company — which Alice is certain is not her own.

Her instinct is Mira. Nora briefs her on what trauma does to recall, and coaches her to come at the girl as a maternal figure, which Alice, raised without a mother, has no idea how to perform. She goes her own way instead. Mira cannot describe the woman’s face — the episode takes its title from the psychological term for memory being reshaped by what arrives after it — but she remembers two things: the woman said her father was sick, and the woman had no feeling in her fingertips.

Then she hands over a photograph she was told to give the police. Three men: Oliver Charles, Caleb Easton and Jay Easton. Two girls. One has her back to the camera. The other is identified through facial recognition against Child Protective Services records as Isabel Luna, who was in the foster system until 2012, when the records stop at age 15.

That photograph reframes the series. The victims are not a spree; they are a group, and the case is about what happened to a girl who has been missing from official records for fourteen years.

The Marshall thread comes to a head in the same episode. He asks Alice to visit his dying mother — the woman who raised Alice after her own mother left — and the visit turns out to be leverage: she wants Alice to withdraw what she said and unblock her son’s career. When Alice refuses and tries to leave, Marshall physically blocks her car door, and she draws her weapon on him.

The thread the investigation has not caught up with is Becky Lydgate, a worker at the shelter Catherine has been using, and it runs across all three episodes. It starts in episode 1, where Becky helps her get an ID, lends her a laptop, and notices how much of that laptop time is going on a rich lawyer named Oliver Charles. In episode 2 it turns: they sleep together, and Catherine tells her afterwards that she took a photograph while they did — then follows it straight away with a shopping list of latex gloves, paper towels, bleach cleaner and wipes. In episode 3 Catherine kills her, and this is the one the police get to quickly: they trace her phone and find the body. It is also the killing that does not fit — the M.O. is wrong and there are multiple needle marks, as though whoever did it kept stopping. Alice’s question at the scene is the one the series wants you holding: why leave the daughter alive and kill this woman?

Catherine ends the episode practising a new name for a new persona, into a camera: Marta Dreznick.

Written by Alexa Derman, directed by Karena Evans.

Who’s in the Furious cast?

What is Black Widow (1987), and how does it end?

Hulu calls Furious “loosely adapted” from it, and the loosely is doing real work — but the bones are the same.

Black Widow is a Bob Rafelson thriller released in February 1987, written by Ronald Bass. Debra Winger plays Alexandra “Alex” Barnes, a Justice Department data analyst; Theresa Russell plays Catharine, who marries wealthy men, poisons them, inherits, changes her name and her look, and moves west to do it again.

Alex finds her in the paperwork. Healthy rich men keep dying of improbable causes — one of them Ondine’s curse, a condition that stops you breathing in your sleep — and each of them had recently married a woman who, under different hair and different names, keeps looking like the same person. Nobody above her is interested. She goes after it anyway, and eventually goes undercover in Hawaii, where she befriends her suspect under a false name and both women become entangled with the same man, Paul Nuytten, whom Catharine marries.

⚠️ The 1987 ending, in full: Paul dies, and Catharine has arranged the evidence so that Alex is the one arrested for it. What she does not know is that the death was staged to trap her. Catharine’s undoing is the intimacy she has been using as a weapon all film: she cannot resist telling Alex what she did, and the confession is what takes her down.

That last move is the part worth holding onto, because it is the thing the series has inherited most directly. In both stories the investigator and the killer end up closer to each other than either is to anyone else, and in both, that closeness is the mechanism rather than the decoration.

What the series changes is the motive, and it changes everything downstream of it. The 1987 Catharine kills for money. Hulu’s Catherine kills men tied to the trafficking and abuse she survived as a child, which turns a story about greed into a story about what was done to her — and gives the show a reason to make Alice a survivor too, rather than the fascinated outsider Alex is.

Both versions tell you who the killer is early rather than playing whodunit; the 1987 film was criticised at the time for giving the game away in its opening stretch. The difference is what that early reveal is for. In the film it sets up a duel. In the series it sets up a question about whether you are willing to want her to get away with it.

One credit ties the two together: Ronald Bass, who wrote the 1987 screenplay, is an executive producer on the series.

Is Furious worth watching?

Yes, on the evidence of three episodes — and the scores are unusually emphatic, though not in the way the headline number suggests.

As of 28 July 2026, Furious holds 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from 25 reviews — 25 positive, zero negative, average rating 8.70/10 — and is Certified Fresh. The audience score is 92% across 50+ ratings. Metacritic puts it at 80 from 17 critics.

Those two numbers are measuring different things, on different sets of reviews, and the difference is the interesting part. Rotten Tomatoes sorts each review it counts into positive or negative, and all 25 of the ones it counted came out positive. Metacritic keeps the grade instead, across its own smaller set of 17: 91 (IndieWire), 88 (RogerEbert.com), 83 (The A.V. Club), a cluster at 80 (Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Collider), and a 38 from Slant Magazine at the bottom.

The two sets are not the same reviews, so this is not one panel of critics disagreeing with itself. What it does show is how much a percentage hides. All 100% tells you is that none of the 25 reviews Rotten Tomatoes counted was filed on the negative side of its own cut-off — not that every critic who has written about the show liked it, and not that the ones who did think it is very good.

What the show is doing structurally is the part worth arguing about. Running the investigator and the killer as parallel leads is not new, but Furious removes the mystery deliberately: we know who Catherine is and what she is doing from the first episode, so the series cannot coast on a reveal. What it gets in exchange is the ability to make Alice’s slowness meaningful — every hour she spends being disbelieved is an hour we watch the next killing get closer.

The riskier choice is putting Alice’s own abuse at the centre alongside the case, and by episode 3 the show has committed to it hard enough that it cannot be read as texture. Making Marshall the detective on Oliver Charles’s murder is a screenwriting decision with obvious costs — it is a very tidy coincidence — but it buys the season a structural argument the case alone could not make: the institution that failed Alice is the same institution now investigating the man who bought Catherine.

The scheduling is worth noting too. Three episodes at once, then weekly, front-loads the entire premise: by the end of the drop the audience has the killer, the victim pattern, the personal history and the photograph. That is a lot of table-setting delivered before the weekly wait begins, and it suggests a season with a second half to protect.

Our verdict so far: 8/10, through three of eight episodes. That is our read of what has aired, not a season judgement — the photograph in episode 3 sets up a question the remaining five episodes have to answer, and shows of this shape have failed at exactly that point before.

If you like this register, our The East Palace cast, recap and ending explained covers another series built on a late structural reveal, and Rick and Morty season 9 episode 10 takes apart a finale that turns on the same trick of showing you the answer early.

Where can you watch Furious?

In the United States, on Hulu — and on Hulu on Disney+ if you have the bundle. All three released episodes are streaming now, with the rest arriving on Mondays through 31 August 2026.

In several markets outside the United States it is a Disney+ title instead — we confirmed listings in the UK, Canada and Australia on 28 July 2026.

The series is a Hulu original produced by 20th Television and Searchlight Television, so it is included with the subscription rather than sold separately.