France is one of the many local markets around the world where Netflix has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in support of productions that range from big-budget feature films to TV shows and splashy reality series. Furies, a gritty crime drama that’s rocketing up Netflix’s US Top 10 chart, is one of the newest examples of this push from the streamer — a straightforward, eight-episode revenge saga involving the Parisian criminal underworld and a woman seeking to avenge the death of her father. Which is to say: You can sort of think of this new series like a French, female-led version of John Wick.
Thefts, robberies, prostitution, murder — the Paris of Furies is presented as a dichotomy, as both the city of light and love, as well as a hotbed of crime. Six mafia families run their business in the city. None of them tolerates chaos or anarchy, a narrator tells us … that is, until money and power are at stake. And then all bets are off, as underscored by an opening Wick-like sequence featuring a blonde, pistol-packing woman who shoots and fights her way solo into a den of bad guys.
The protagonist here is Lyna, a young woman whose parents are part of the criminal underworld. The daughter knows what’s what but tends to keep her distance from it all; she’s a student, living life and spending time with her boyfriend. Everything remains relatively stable until she visits her parents on her birthday.
When you’re born into the underworld — Lyna muses aloud in narration, over a flashback scene in which she blows out the candles on her most recent birthday cake — “sooner or later it catches up with you.” Her father is shot to death in front of her eyes, his bloodied face landing unceremoniously onto her cake. He was shot in the eye and in the hand, a cop later tells Lyna. “That’s not your average hit, that’s a message from The Fury.”
The Fury, we come to learn, is the woman tasked with keeping a relative peace between the crime families. That opens up a much larger criminal world with its own rituals and hierarchies, similar to “The Table” and everyone connected to it in the John Wick movies.
The Wick comparison might raise some eyebrows, but I mention it only as a frame of reference for this solid, action-packed series that Netflix seems to have done precisely zero marketing for. It’s #7 in the US as I write this, and I’m certainly glad that I found it by accident; raw and unsparing crime dramas are one of my favorite things to watch on Netflix, and they also provide a great vehicle for emotionally resonant storytelling. That Furies is set in Paris, with all the sumptuous city scenes and eye candy that entails, is but the cherry on top.