3 series to binge if you liked Furious (and where to binge them)

Furious was a great binge series, a tense thriller with complex characters and a storyline that kept us on our toes. But it wasn’t the first series to do that sort of thing, so if you liked it, here are three more similar series that you should enjoy.

Dexter (Paramount +)

Dexter is one of those series that just won’t die (pardon the pun). Its initial run was 8 seasons, then it returned eight years after the series finale as Dexter: New Blood, Dexter: Resurrection, and a prequel series called Dexter: Original Sin. The second season of the prequel series will premiere next month.

The series had a unique premise, following Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), who worked as a forensic analyst in Miami, with his foul-mouthed sister Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) working there as well. The twist was that Dexter was a killer, literally hiding out in plain sight. He seemed like just a nice, amiable guy who was good at his job.

Twist part two: While Dexter does kill people pretty regularly, his victims basically deserve their bloody ending, because they are all bad guys who have managed to thwart the legal system. Despite his slightly goofy, easy going persona, he is actually a typical serial killer in most ways, always wrapping his victims up in plastic to secure them to a table, then using a knife to kill them. He keeps microscopic slides containing blood samples for each of them.

As the series progressed, we learned about Dexter’s home life; his adoptive father Harry was a Miami police detective who recognized Dexter’s sociopathic tendencies fairly early on, and trained him to use “the code” when deciding on his victims.

As a child, Dexter had been locked in a shipping crate with the dismembered body of his mother, sitting in pools of her blood for two days before Harry discovered him.

Connection with Furious: Just as Catherine’s trauma led her to choose victims that had done bad things, so has Dexter’s.

True Detective: Night Country (HBO Max)

The fourth season of True Detective took a bit of a turn from the prior seasons, putting focus on a female-driven storyline in Alaska. Issa Lopez (who created the sublime Tigers Are Not Afraid) wrote and directed, as well as serving as the series’ showrunner.

In Ennis, Alaska, Police Chief Liz Danvers (Jodi Foster) is fighting personal demons that we learn more about as the series goes on. Ennis is going through its annual four months of darkness, which only makes the series more eerie.

Liz is an alcoholic who is disliked by most people in town, and her closest personal relationship is with her stepdaughter Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) – and that relationship is rocky due to Leah’s involvement in protests and causes related to the Indigenous population in Ennis.

Liz and Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) end up working together on a puzzling case involving eight missing scientists who worked at a research facility. When their facility is investigated, the severed tongue of a woman is found on the floor, and the bodies of the men are later discovered naked and frozen in a solid mass.

Connection with Furious: Both storylines are female driven, and both involve trauma and sex trafficking.

Killing Eve (Netflix)

Words cannot express how obsessed I was with this series when I first started watching it! Sandra Oh used her quirkiness to its best advantage while playing Eve, a British intelligence employee who was starting to lose interest in her job. But while investigating an assassination in Vienna, she starts to connect it with some other killings she had been brushing up on just for the hell of it.

Eve suspects the highly trained and talented assassin might be a woman – and, as it turns out, she is right on the nose. The killer is Villanelle, a young woman with some pretty scary psycho traits, who greatly enjoys her job.

Eve is subsequently fired, but then hired by the Russia M16 to exclusively hunt for Villanelle. And that’s where the fun starts. We alternate between Eve’s attempts to track the killer, and Villanelle’s multiple killings, all while the two women play a cat and mouse game.

The violence is brutal, the characters are intriguing, and the laughs are heavily sprinkled throughout the storyline. Seriously, Oh and Comer play their roles so well that they are a constant joy to watch.

The first two seasons of Killing Eve are the best of the four total seasons, but once you start binging, you won’t want to stop.

Connection with Furious: Both stories feature strong women on opposite sides of the law, and manage to garner some empathy for the killers.

Furious can be streamed in its entirety on Hulu