Most dramas about murderous women save the revelations of deviance for the end, after parceling out uncertainty and complication. Furious does things exactly backwards. Here is a monster, the Hulu series announces with its very first scene, during which an unblinking blonde in a Halloween cat mask kills a man by forcibly injecting him with fentanyl, which she keeps in a bedazzled silver tin. “I don’t really like listening to you,” she whispers, as he gasps for breath. “I don’t like the sounds you’re making. But I love your smile.” After he dies, she reaches for a bowl of candy corn, which she eats slowly and with care, piece by piece.

The scene felt confrontational to me at first watch, as though it were daring me to switch it off in discomfort. But why? Crime shows begin with violated women all the time—the naked, bloodied female corpse is such a staple in the genre’s visual language that viewers hardly notice it. Why is a scene of a young woman luxuriating in her sadistic treatment of a man so unsettling? As Furious goes on, it offers up more murders, but also more context for why this woman, Catherine (played by Lola Petticrew), is doing what she’s doing—and although she remains monstrous, the show shades in her full, horrifying humanity.

Furious—created by the writer Liz Meriwether and executive-produced by the actor Emmy Rossum, who also stars in it—is preoccupied with elemental ideas about violence and transformation, which juxtapose nicely with the more conventional framework of a police procedural. Rossum plays Alice, a former detective turned FBI grunt who’s dragged into investigating Catherine’s latest victim by her former partner Danny (Scoot McNairy). Like Catherine, Alice has been warped by trauma; her previous boyfriend, also a police officer (Jake Lacy), beat her, and all of her colleagues except Danny froze her out when she finally reported him. She uses apps to find sexual partners who will agree to beat her, role-playing her own abuse. In one episode, she outright refuses to shower, a tendency that seems off-putting until her sister reveals to Danny that her ex used to drag her from the shower to hit her, sometimes leaving her passed out under the running water.

[Read: Everything we know about rape is wrong]

Early on, the show evokes Medusa—whose rape at the hands of Poseidon saw her turned into a hideous Gorgon with snakes for hair—in reference to Catherine, whose own history is at least as cruel; there are also multiple references to the Furies, winged goddesses of retribution. Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), who runs the FBI sex-crimes division that Alice is trying to get assigned to, describes the room that agents use to review child-sexual-abuse material as “the darkest pit of Hades down deep in the bottom of the Earth.” Washington’s perpetual rage, and her attempts to quash it with emotional detachment and tequila, suffuses every scene she’s in.

Watching the show, I remembered the moment, almost a decade ago, when women’s anger became the subject of countless books and news stories—when many people expressed hope that it might have a revolutionary power. Instead, during a period when women have lost fundamental rights and have been confronted with the apparent futility of their protests, cultural narratives about women’s rage no longer have the luxury of optimism. Instead, anger has metastasized into vengeance, inflamed and out for blood.

While watching Furious, I happened to read Honey, by Imani Thompson: a wry and erudite take on the dark-academia genre about a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge named Yrsa (derived from an Old Norse word for “furious”) who—almost accidentally—becomes a serial killer. Yrsa’s journey toward murder begins casually one day, when she tips a bee into the lemonade of an older male colleague who has betrayed Yrsa’s friend and stolen credit for the research project they were working on together. When the bee stings the man, who’s allergic to them, Yrsa watches while he chokes to death, observing “the theatrics of the wheezing man. The red-hot raspberry of his face.” When he falls to the ground, she gets onto her knees and strokes his hair. Afterward, she eats ice cream. Murder in the book becomes associated with sweetness and satiation. In dull moments after the man’s death, Yrsa replays the scene in her mind, and it fills her up.

Thompson wanted to write about a female serial killer, she said in one interview, because “we always see the woman as a victim,” in ways that are often glamorized. But Yrsa is also working on a Ph.D. about “Afropessimism and Black women’s discourses on their liberation,” and the book is studded with references to academics and writers who consider the heritage of violence. Yrsa often uses critical theory to try to justify what she’s doing: She cites thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Stuart Hall, and Saidiya Hartman, and fixates particularly on Hartman’s essay Venus in Two Acts, about all of the nameless murdered Black girls obliterated by history. How, Hartman wonders, can she “revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?” In Yrsa’s mind, this question becomes twisted into the idea that punishing abusive men might redress some of the imbalance.

Yrsa does so in part by tracking down men outed on a site where sex workers name their most vicious clients. She injects one with a fatal dose of heroin and enjoys doing it, much like Catherine, savoring the memory of “that moment when she realized he was vulnerable only to her. That moment when she could do anything.” Late in Furious, Catherine tells Alice about how her brutal actions feel to her: “It’s power, watching someone die.” She adds, “When I’m killing someone, it’s like I’m eating him, like I’m swallowing him, like everything he’s ever done is disappearing inside me.” She is, it turns out, pursuing and murdering the men who hurt her when she was an underage teenager being trafficked for sex, starting with the pimp who beat, raped, and starved her. Her pleasure in killing, unlike Yrsa’s, is derived not from the act itself but from neutralizing what these men did to her.

[Read: When women are accused of complicity]

The show is a fascinating pivot for Meriwether, who previously created the beloved offbeat Fox comedy New Girl and who most recently co-created the FX series Dying for Sex, about a woman who receives a fatal cancer diagnosis and decides to pursue sexual pleasure in her final months. There are moments in Furious that come off as morbidly comic—an FBI agent played by Rob Yang shouts “Boom!” at inopportune moments, and a witness with muscular dystrophy (Steve Way) needles police officers with his wheelchair—but more often, the series is pitch-dark. The show was shot with anamorphic lenses to foster a moody, surveillant feeling, evoking David Fincher more than Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The point seems to be to use the visual language of neo-noir while shifting the focus to characters who don’t usually draw the camera’s attention.

Furious has been referred to as a “crime drama for a post-Epstein world,” and one of the characters—a billionaire with similar proclivities who seems to operate with impunity—seems modeled after the serial sex offender. “The ones who are really to blame don’t get caught, never, never,” Nora tells Alice. “You think you’re ever gonna catch anyone who matters?” But Meriwether, in an interview with Vulture, noted that she was “much more interested in the experience of the women than I am with the experience of the perpetrator,” and the show is especially curious regarding women who become compelled to victimize others. What does living with that kind of trauma and injustice do to a person’s psyche? “My memory sucks,” Catherine says in one scene, trying to piece together fragments of her past life into a coherent shape. “It’s ’cause I got strangled so much.”

The actors in Furious are uniformly brilliant: Bernstine’s achingly blasé Nora; McNairy’s frowsy, compassionate Danny; Rossum’s magnetic and volatile Alice. Petticrew turns Catherine’s postured immaturity into something vividly repulsive—she’s constantly restaging the girlhood she never got to have, but in an unavoidably corrupted way. By the show’s end, we can better understand her, even if we’re lucky enough not to have her tolerance for cruelty. What happens to anger when it can’t be absorbed? We can only consider whether there’s truth in Nora’s assertion that only evil can really fight evil, and that in order to defend humanity, you occasionally have to sacrifice your own.

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Almost 20 years ago, I had tickets to see Amy Winehouse perform in London, at a show that was canceled just an hour before it was scheduled to start. A friend and I went to a nearby hotel bar instead, and not much later, in walked Winehouse herself—tiny, grubby, and completely incoherent. She walked over to us and stared, her eyes both furious and vacant, until someone in her entourage came and dragged her away. I remember the person who flashed to mind in that bizarre moment: the gossip blogger Perez Hilton.

If you weren’t regularly online during the late 2000s, it’s hard to explain how dominant a presence Hilton was—how incessantly he posted about what celebrities might be doing on any given day, how shameless he was about posting upskirt photos, how judgmental his tirades about young women in crisis were. His fiendish MO was lifting pictures from paparazzi agencies and then scribbling penises or obscene epithets on them in order to claim fair use. Hilton—whose real name is Mario Lavandeira Jr.—was particularly cruel about Winehouse, who was being photographed by the celebrity press almost daily in states of disarray. He posted, by turns, about her physical appearance (“super skinny, dirty and wasted”), false rumors of her pregnancy (“We were sure that her ovaries were too gin-soaked to be of any use”), and a performance in which she wasn’t wearing underwear (“Grrrossss!!!!!!!!! Who needs to see cracked out snatch?”).

PerezHilton.com was relentless and brutal, and its readers could not get enough, especially when the blog’s coverage collided with moments of calamitous celebrity breakdown. (When the actor Lindsay Lohan was arrested in 2007, the site reportedly received 8.8 million pageviews that day.) Since then, the internet has metastasized into something officially kinder—we no longer berate famous people in crisis for sport quite as much as we used to—and quietly more appalling, where irony-poisoned young men broadcast their executions and social-media companies seem to basically shrug in response. And so, on Tuesday night, during what seemed to be a mental-health breakdown of his own, Hilton was able to stream himself live on TikTok cutting himself with a knife for about 15 minutes before his broadcast was finally interrupted.

Any number of Hilton’s followers on TikTok could have clicked on the stream thinking they were going to see a standard broadcast about Ariana Grande or Trader Joe’s ready meals (both of which Hilton had posted about on YouTube in recent weeks). Instead, they got a scene of unimaginable violence. “I am fine with horror/gore, have seen a lot real and fake, and this was so deeply disturbing I could not get the image out of my head all night,” one commenter posted on Reddit. Another added, “I watch cartel torture and beheading videos with no issues. I had to turn the perez video off after about 20 seconds, and I felt deeply disturbed for hours.”

TikTok’s failure to interrupt Hilton’s broadcast for such a long time, even as horrified viewers were reporting it, is astonishing. (A spokesperson for the site told Wired that a “moderator error” caused a delay in removal; another told Vanity Fair that Hilton was persistent in his attempts to broadcast what he was doing, using several different streams to do so.)

[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]

In the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Act shields technology and communication companies from being held legally responsible for third-party content that appears on their platforms. And since Facebook launched livestreaming in 2015, social-media sites have struggled to establish safeguards for atrocities being broadcast in real time, to the point where the phenomenon of people livestreaming their own attempts to die has become “an emerging public health crisis,” in the words of psychology researchers. After a man livestreamed himself killing 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 on Facebook Live, Facebook said it was investing in “technical innovation” to prevent people from abusing its platform. Nevertheless, footage of mass shootings and other atrocities proliferates globally before befuddled tech companies can tie their shoes.

The tone of the contemporary internet is also darker and more nihilist than it has ever been. “Social-media platforms—and especially X—have loosened their grip on moderation at the same time that AI tools have allowed for the easy proliferation of slop,” my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote earlier this year. “Never before has there been so much cynical, cruel content and trolling.”

But the idea that Hilton might end up turning self-harm into content feels particularly fraught. A statement from his family posted online said that the influencer had been “experiencing a severe mental-health crisis,” and that his three children, his niece, and his sister were at home with Hilton when he began hurting himself, although they left immediately “to protect the children from witnessing any further trauma.” Over the past decade and a half, Hilton has tried to pivot away from the bilious celebrity coverage that made him so successful: In a 2010 video, he announced that he would no longer be cruel. But his popularity never quite recovered, and he argued in his 2020 memoir, TMI, that the toxicity of his site was what had appealed to his readers, even if they didn’t want to admit it to themselves: “The more snarky names I gave the celebrities, the more penises or coke or boogers I drew on pictures of them, the more people visited my page.”

It’s also true that PerezHilton.com peaked in its cultural relevance around 2007, the year that celebrity after celebrity seemed to be breaking down in public while pursued by paparazzi on mopeds. That year, Britney Spears shaved her head (when the actor Heath Ledger died in 2008, Hilton sold T-shirts emblazoned with the words Why Couldn’t It Be Britney?), Anna-Nicole Smith overdosed on prescription medication, Lohan was arrested for cocaine possession, Paris Hilton went to jail, and Mischa Barton was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. Hilton documented each of these moments in vivid and elaborate detail—my browser finally quit when I got to page 79 of his archives related to Amy Winehouse—because he understood what people wanted from him and his work. “When Britney Spears was at her wildest, people were glued to my website,” he wrote in TMI.

It’s impossible to know whether this awareness informed what he did to himself this week, and how he did it. Hilton’s breakdown is desperately sad; I’m haunted by the idea of what his children might have seen happen in their home, but also by the idea of what all children might see, at any time, in this hopelessly corrupted and seemingly unsalvageable internet.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.