When I started watching Furious on Disney, I expected a decent watchable drama that I could escape in. I heard it featured a female serial killer and thought it sounded interesting enough to give it a go.

From the first episode, it felt different to the usual formulaic cop show. The perspectives of the female characters were not after-thoughts. They are the whole show. The vengeful killer Catherine (played by Lola Petticrew) is allowed to be more than just her crimes. Yes, she’s traumatised from the abuse she has suffered since childhood but she has empathy for those who are often ignored. She is funny, bright and charismatic without being overly sexualised. What she isn’t is a perfect victim.

The idea of a perfect victim is explored throughout the series. When does a victim stop being a victim? Is it when she becomes a teenager? As the daughter of one of the abusers points out, Catherine was a teenager, not a little girl. Should this matter?

As FBI agent Nora explains, women who accept money for sex don’t count. They are not seen as victims. Catherine tells Alice, the FBI agent who goes after her, that she didn’t get to decide anything about her life. Taking the lives of the men who have hurt her has been the only way she has exerted any power.

Catherine isn’t the only victim in the show. Alice has an abusive ex who she still has to work with and whose abuse affects her to the point that she doesn’t feel safe enough to shower. Alice (played by Emmy Rossum) is also one of the teenagers on the videos they later find and it becomes clear that she has a lot more in common with Catherine than she realises.

All of the female characters are hurting. They are all trying to cope with this pain in different ways, often ending with them turning it inwards. Alice meets men online who will physically hurt her. When she has to explain her bruises to Nora, the two women understand each other without having to say much. Nora has spent years watching child abuse as a part of her job and she drinks to numb her feelings. She’s just trying to get through the day.

Facing up to the realities of abuse is ultimately what helps each of these women. Catherine struggles with her memory (something a lot of survivors of abuse can relate to). It may have protected her from some details, but she is frustrated with her own mind, and she becomes determined to fill in the gaps. By the end Alice is also able to confront what happened to her as a child and it feels as if there may be hope that healing is possible.

Furious doesn’t sugar coat. It doesn’t make one of the women the perfect victim or heroine. The daughter of Easton (the ageing predator with friends in high places) helps her abusive father. She protects herself and enables him. She remembers though. She remembers the girls used by the man who should have been her protector. She gave them drugs and bought flowers to ‘make it nice’.

Created by Elizabeth Meriwether, Furious deals with themes that are all too familiar to many of us. There is no clear path to justice. No easy way to heal. Our lives are messy and the show portrays that in a way I’ve not seen too frequently. The women are real and resilient and, in her quest, to catch abusers, Nora (played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine) has possibly the best line in the show “I’m not getting high and mighty, I am high and mighty”.