• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 10 hours ago

Entertainment takes a permanent holiday with a new serial-killer police procedural premiering Monday on Hulu.

It is called “Furious,” a title whose meaning is not made entirely clear in Episode One, which the TV Blog previewed on Friday.

One thing that is entirely clear, however, is that this show intends to depict its murder scenes in the slowest, most excruciating detail possible.

This intention is signaled in the show’s opening scene, in which a murder is committed by a sick, sadistic young woman who kills her victim in stages.

In between them, she sits peaceably on the stoop of his Brooklyn Heights brownstone giving out candy to trick-or-treaters.

Soon, she reenters the house and we are treated to the final stage of her killing of this man who is an heir to a billion-dollar fortune.

He is already dying, but she talks to him in a soft voice while he struggles to live. She then injects something into his arm. 

Whatever it is, it is lethal, but slow-acting, so we get to hear him gurgle for a while before expiring.

Soon, it is on to a series of deceptions and manipulations of others en route to another murder that figures to be similar to the first one in its method and sadism.

The fact that this series starts with a scene from which most people will avert their eyes is puzzling.

Causing viewers to turn away from a TV show with scenes of unspeakable -- and in many cases, unwatchable -- violence has always seemed counterintuitive to me, especially at the very outset of the show.

Isn’t the point of making a TV show to have people’s eyes remain on it for as long and as often as possible? Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.

By virtue of this grotesque crime, the young psycho killer (played by Lola Petticrew) takes center stage in the opening of this show.

But the star of “Furious” is Emma Rossum (above photo), who plays a newly minted, low-on-the-totem pole FBI agent who was formerly a homicide wiz in the NYPD.

When this scion to a huge fortune is found dead, NYPD homicide detectives in Brooklyn bring her in. 

But her return to her old stomping grounds goes against the wishes and orders of her gruff FBI supervisor, who frowns and chews her out. Predictably, she defies him.

This storyline where the former detective is called in by her former colleagues is one of the oldest police-procedural clichés in the book.

In this instance, as in many other TV shows and movies, there is no evidence to suggest that the NYPD detectives are not up to the job of investigating this crime on their own and without her help.

The things she discovers at the crime scene are not exactly invisible. NYPD detectives would have found them too. 

As the show proceeds, the clichés pile up. Lo and behold, the FBI agent, Alice Black, has a dark side of her own -- namely, she likes to get beaten up as foreplay before sex.

We get to see one of these interludes in painful closeup too. She then ends up satisfying herself, and before you know it, she is back on the trail of this killer, who coincidentally also happens to have a sadomasochistic streak.

Cliché alert: This is supposed to suggest that the psychopath and the homicide investigator are really two peas in the same pod. 

So, what does the show’s “Furious” title refer to? The implication seems to be that the young murderess had once been a victim of sex trafficking, possibly by a Jeffrey Epstein-like gazillionaire and various rich associates.

Understandably, this experience might make a young woman furious. But furious enough to become a serial killer?

In this show, the answer is evidently yes.

“Furious” starts streaming on Monday (July 27) on Hulu.