Furies (Netflix)

French TV and film, I guess like visual media from any country, has its own unique style. They tell stories in different ways, use visual metaphors differently and often have different outcomes to their stories too. If you think of big hit films like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element and Leon can you imagine any of them being made by an American director? It’s not just the French that do this of course, British TV is distinctly different to American TV, even when one nation remakes the other’s shows. Think of the two versions of The Office but even shows where there’s hardly any format change can have vastly different fortunes: College Bowl is an American quiz show you’ve possibly never heard of, it has run for six seasons across its initial run and two relaunches. University Challenge, the British version, is currently in its 54th season, although it has had a brief hiatus and a channel swap.

Why all this preamble? Furies is similar to a number of shows and films I’ve seen before. Both TV versions and the film version of Nikita for example, Atomic Blonde too. To some extent films like Red Sparrow - there are a whole host of female spy/assassin movies out there that stay in the normal world rather than the superhero world. But, like La Femme Nikita, Furies has that distinctly French sensibility.

There are, of course, action scenes and because we have Lena as our new Fury in training those “level up” across the series in a way that feels organic but also satisfying. There’s an ongoing intrigue that remains the main arc, although it moves between being what, in an American network show you’d call, the A, B or C story. In French TV shows on Netflix I’m not sure that’s quite the right terminology but it probably makes the right point. Sometimes Lena's personal life, in all kinds of aspects, sometimes stories about the wider ensemble fill those other parts. However, and the reason I said I’m not sure the A, B and C story description applies, is that some of the episodes use structures like that but others don’t, whatever best serves the needs of the story in that episode. In fact, over eight episodes we get a wonderful mix of story-telling techniques and while I’m not the biggest fan of all of them they’re all well executed and make sense for the story when they’re being used. It makes it more comfortable to watch, especially when, as the watcher, I know it’s not going to be the same format in the next episode and it’s telling the story well in this one.

This series is also hilarious. Not all the time, there’s an episode where a chunk of the story is about sex trafficking and that’s very much joke free. But other episodes have much less serious themes and much more humour. It’s not the kind of show I expected to laugh out loud at but I often did.

There are some heavy episodes floating around. The titular furies are not like Section from Nikita, they’re assassins that act as peacekeepers between the major crime families of Paris and that leads to story lines that are not always comfortable. They’re not the focus of the story, more part of the scenery, which makes for an easier watch. (There are, undoubtedly, much harder hitting dramas that look at these aspects of major crime in more depth, as well as documentaries, but this show is about the Furies moving around in that world.)

This won’t be for everyone. But a kick-ass anti-heroine or two, with nicely layered stories? It ticked a lot of boxes for me.

Bechdel Test: Pass. It’s not only this pair, but the Fury and her apprentice talk a lot in every episode. They both have names, and while they occasionally talk about men, they talk about women, training and lots of other things too. Easy pass.

Ko Test: Pass. I was tempted to say null. The original is all in French of course so no one speaks English. But it’s not a racism thing, it’s a French TV show. But the spirit of the Ko Test is discrimination in terms of language spoken on the basis of race. Lena, the apprentice Fury, is a WOC, so is her mother (who we don’t see often, but we do a bit) and a few other characters, including an important cop, whose name currently eludes me. They all speak French in the original. So that’s a pass by spirit.

Russo Test: Fail. There are queer-coded characters around, three of them to my eye, arguably four (one is married but still reads very ace rather than straight, and I say that as someone who hardly ever reads subtext ace characters). However, it remains queer-coded and everyone we see in a sexual relationship is straight.