‘Furious’ is TV’s summer hit. A ‘scrappy’ Emmy Rossum and an obscure ’80s thriller made it happen.

When I spoke with Emmy Rossum in July, I had just screened the first three episodes of her new show, Furious. She stars in and executive produces the Hulu thriller, and while I suspected she had a hit on her hands, I couldn’t have anticipated all the twists that would bring Alice and Catherine together in Monday’s gripping season finale. What struck me most during our conversation, however, was how much unseen work it had taken to get the show off the ground.

Getting there began with a choice. After nine seasons on Shameless, Rossum was offered what she described in our previous interview as “very life-changing money” to remain on the Showtime series. She could stay with the security of a long-running hit or continue pursuing her dream of building something of her own.

“There was no number that was going to make me want to stray from my goal,” she told me.

And so she left the show to focus on building Composition 8, the production company she created to develop stories “that explore contemporary womanhood.” Not every project survived. Some “died,” Rossum said, while others remain unmade or are still finding their way. 

Furious was the first to fully take root. The eight-part series became one of the summer’s breakout TV hits, with views for Episode 7 up 40% from the premiere, according to Hulu. The series debuted with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes and has held strong at 98%. Hulu renewed it for a second season four days before the Aug. 31 finale, a notably early decision in an industry that often waits weeks for longer-term streaming data.

But Rossum hadn’t simply been handed a buzzy new series. Her production company couldn’t afford the kind of “hot, fancy IP” — think superhero franchises or Elle, the Legally Blonde revival — that attracts Hollywood’s biggest bidders. So she had to dig deeper.

“As a producer, you have to be scrappy,” Rossum explained. “You have to look for clues in other places that other people aren’t looking. That’s how I put this show together.” She presented her creative team with a challenge one summer: to look “through old titles of movies that had interesting loglines [and] felt very female, as that is our desire at the company.” 

That search led to Black Widow, the 1987 psychological thriller starring Debra Winger and Theresa Russell. Directed by Bob Rafelson, the film follows a federal investigator, played by Winger, who notices that several wealthy men died while married to the same mysterious woman, played by Russell. As the investigator becomes increasingly consumed by the case, her pursuit places her in danger.

Rossum and her team had never seen the nearly 40-year-old movie, but its central premise stood out.

“The elevator pitch felt immediately sticky, which is: a female FBI agent hunting a female serial killer,” she said. “Immediately, I’m in.”

There was also an unexpected personal connection. Russell had worked with Rossum in the 2002 film Passionada when Rossum was 14. “I was just like, ‘Oh, there’s some invisible thread here that’s pulling me,'” she recalled.

After watching Black Widow, Rossum saw both what made the movie compelling and what a contemporary television adaptation could build on.

“We felt like it had the perfect skeleton,” she said. “There were things that you could not explore in a 90-minute movie that felt worthy of expansion in a series.”

One of those elements was the treatment of Winger’s character, whose instincts are repeatedly dismissed by her male colleagues. The misogyny and toxic workplace are touched upon in the movie — and sometimes played for humor, Rossum noted — and the actor saw “some real stuff to dig into.”

“There was a lot of contemporary relevance to having those conversations,” she said.

Rossum brought the idea to Hulu, where she had previously developed the Peacock limited series Angelyne. She remembers sending a simple text to someone at the company: “Hey, have you seen this movie? I think it would make a great show.”

The reply, as Rossum remembers it, was essentially: “Thumbs-up emoji. What do you think of Liz Meriwether?” Suddenly, “all my dreams were coming true,” Rossum recalled.

Meriwether, the creator of New Girl who also made Hulu’s The Dropout and FX’s Dying for Sex, ultimately created and executive-produced Furious. She also knew from the beginning which side of the show’s cat-and-mouse pursuit Rossum should inhabit.

“Liz had always imagined that [Alice] was the role that I would play,” Rossum said. “And I was really interested in women in law enforcement.”

The series reimagines Winger’s investigator as Alice Black, a former NYPD detective working for the FBI, while Lola Petticrew plays Catherine, the serial killer she is pursuing. Both women are survivors of violence who are searching for justice, gradually blurring the line between investigator and suspect. It’s an especially timely take in a post-Jeffrey Epstein era.

For Rossum, Alice offered the longer, more complicated character journey she had been seeking since leaving Shameless in 2019.

“To me, Alice is the central character that has the furthest to grow,” she said.

That doesn’t mean Rossum wasn’t tempted by the other side.

“Lola is so brilliant in their portrayal of Catherine, and that character is also so incredibly delicious,” she said. “I would have loved to play that one too.”

The show’s success also rests on the spectacular ensemble surrounding Rossum and Petticrew. Steve Way’s Alden brings unexpected warmth through his tender relationship with Catherine, while Quincy Tyler Bernstine’s FBI agent Nora Washington emerged as a fan favorite, and Scoot McNairy made Alice’s former partner, Danny Kelly, quietly heartbreaking.

Ultimately, part of Alice’s appeal was how far the character departed from Rossum’s previous roles. “Alice is so different than a lot of the things that I’ve done in the past,” she said.

Rossum also immersed herself in Alice’s professional world before filming.

“The journey for me of having this long runway to get to work with former and current FBI [agents] and detectives was amazing,” she said.

She found a personal connection to Alice’s position as an underestimated woman working inside male-dominated institutions. Rossum knows something about being underestimated. In fact, she prefers it.

“Then people aren’t looking at what you’re doing, and you get to carve your own path and be surprising — and surprise yourself,” she said.

She also sees an advantage in having expectations to defy.

“I think it would be way harder to be overestimated and then underdeliver,” Rossum said. “I thrive being the underdog. I feel like I’ve been the underdog since kindergarten. That’s really my happy place and where I feel the most creative.”

Rossum may thrive as the underdog, but she isn’t interested in waiting for Hollywood to catch up. When asked whether the industry has become more open to women occupying multiple creative lanes, she said change comes from making the work impossible to ignore.

“Instead of asking and demanding change, you just have to make it unavoidable,” she said. “You have to make something that is undeniable.”

When she said that, nobody had seen Furious yet. A summer hit and a Season 2 renewal later, Rossum has made her point.