This isn't a usual 'What Stars Watch' entry
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In a matter of 48 hours, I'd gone from never having heard about new Hulu and Disney+ show Furious to having binged the entire season in one go. Frankly, my only regret is that I hadn't done this sooner.
Despite streaming services being oversaturated with crime drama content, Furious is as astonishing cut above the rest. Across its eight episodes, we follow FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) as she hunts Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew), a calculating sex-trafficking survivor turned serial killer.
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Rather than being a cat-and-mouse two-hander like Killing Eve, we quickly become entrenched in the secretive and corrupt worlds of both law enforcement and the upper echelons of society. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, but in the most hideous of ways.
Normally when I speak to the cast of a series that has such intense and dark undertones, I'll ask them to recommend another series that will act as a way to decompress, if fans wanted to do a double bill.
But Scoot McNairy, who plays NYPD detective Danny in the show, has a completely different take on the question… and it's made me look at Furious differently.
"I think that fans are watching Furious to decompress," McNairy tells me. "I think that's why we watch such violent things that are so far out of our world… it's for escapism, to believe the unbelievable.
"When you see something that feels stranger than fiction, but it's real, I think that that is the lure to the show. I mean, I feel like we all watch this stuff to decompress, to get us out of the stuff in our own lives. Liz [Merriweather, showrunner] is doing a really good job at that. We don't know it, but subconsciously it feels like it's all the true crime documentaries are all to decompress. The news media is to decompress."
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And that's when it hits me: what if I've been drawn to watch Furious as quickly and ferociously as I have because I've subconsciously seen it as a way to decompress? McNairy is completely right about the way we view true crime — I've waxed lyrical about BBC iPlayer's Murder 24/7 only earlier this week — but I've never applied the same logic to fictional dramas.
I don't even feel cheated by the fact that McNairy didn't offer me an alternative suggestion to double-bill Furious with, because my mind feels so expanded just through this shift in perspective. I'd even go a step further and argue that playing a law enforcement officer isn't just a rite of passage for actors, but a key conduit of modern life for viewers, too.
"I'll say this: You're not an actor unless you've been in a family or a cop. More drama happens in a family and in law enforcement," McNairy adds. "It's inevitable that that's where the meat of society and the root of all of our trauma is, that our violence and emotions all stem from."
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