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Elizabeth Meriwether is mostly known as a comedy writer, given the fact that her series New Girl ran for seven years. But she’s branched out into more dramatic fare — or at least dramatic fare with a comedic edge — in recent years with shows like The Dropout and Dying For Sex. Furious, her new Hulu series, tries to give a comedic edge to a very serious thriller.

FURIOUS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man gasps and tries to wriggle himself out of his bathroom, unable to even get up from his stomach. Trick-or-treaters are outside the brownstone where he lives.

The Gist: A woman in a mask who calls herself Catherine (Lola Petticrew) is sitting on the stoop. When a kid with his mom comes up to trick or treat, she tells him she’ll go inside and get candy. This is when we see what’s really going on: She’s there to torture and kill the man who owns the house, who is a judge and the son of a prominent New York tycoon.

Meanwhile, at the FBI’s New York office, Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), a relatively new special agent, is fielding phone calls to the bureau’s public number. Unlike some of the agents she works with, she takes all the calls seriously, no matter how outlandish they sound. She gets called into the supervisor’s office; her old NYPD partner, Danny Kelly (Scoot McNairy), has requested her help on an overdose case. Her boss reluctantly lets her go to the scene.

She’s not particularly popular amongst the beat cops at Brooklyn South; one of the reasons she left was because of an abusive relationship she had with a fellow cop (Jake Lacy). As soon as she examines the body of the man Catherine killed, she knows he didn’t OD. And it feels like a similar MO to how a drug dealer was killed the year before.

Catherine, now sporting a red wig and always wearing some sort of mask in public, manipulates her way into a shelter for abused women, steals another woman’s identity, and figures out how to get an ID so she can get a job. She’s already lining up her next victim: A lawyer named Oliver Charles (Rob Delaney).

Alice’s investigation of the murder of the drug dealer reveals that he was suspected to be part of a trafficking ring, which leads her to the basement office of Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), the special agent in charge of investigations into sex crimes and crimes against children. Nora gets personally involved with the women who are victims of these crimes, as she shows when she takes Alice to provide a young woman with an outfit for court so she can testify against the people who trafficked her. But Nora has become embittered over time, knowing that the people who do these crimes are moving targets.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Elizabeth Meriwether and inspired by the 1987 film Black Widow, Furious reminds us of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, another thriller with a comedic edge to it.

Our Take: Furious is a messy show, and not in a good way. It tries to combine the serious with funny moments, like the aforementioned Maximum Pleasure or the recent awards darling Widow’s Bay. Given Meriwether’s track record, you would think that the tone shift would be more deftly handled. But the funny moments in the first episode feel more glib than funny, and come out of the blue as if they were forced into a scene by Meriwether and her staff to remind themselves that the show is supposed to have a sense of humor.

Take the scene where Alice introduces herself to Nora. When Alice comes in, Nora’s assistant says that she’s watching sensitive material with children in it for a case, and that Alice should come back. But when Alice says she’ll wait, the assistant offers her cheese balls from a giant, Costco-sized jar. We guess that the cheese ball thing is supposed to lighten the somber subject matter, but it just feels like it’s out of place there.

That wasn’t the only place we saw funny lines being forced in where they don’t belong. We wonder if it’s because of the subject matter, which mostly has to do with sex trafficking, is just too serious to lighten things up with out-of-nowhere gag-type lines. It’s one thing if Alice’s personality, which we see in one scene leans towards some dark proclivities, yields some sardonic humor as she gets closer to catching Catherine. But most of the rest of the intended humorous content just feels out of place.

But the show is messy for other reasons, not the least of which is Alice’s backstory. She had a violent relationship with a colleague that led her to leave the NYPD, but she likes violence as a twisted form of foreplay, among other things. She wants to work in Nora’s department, and seems to be unfazed by the bitterness and resignedness that Nora has developed over the years in order to disassociate from the horrors she’s seen.

There seems to be just a few too many threads in this show that need to be pulled, and we get the feeling that the closer Alice gets to finding Catherine, some of those threads will end up being neglected.

Performance Worth Watching: Emmy Rossum is appropriately intense as Alice; she plays messy characters well, and Alice’s life is pretty messy.

Sex And Skin: Less sex than you think, though there’s a scene where Catherine goes topless to help get what she wants from the woman running the shelter.

Parting Shot: As we cut between Alice’s and Catherine’s eyes, Alice says “I got you” while looking at blurry CCTV footage.

Sleeper Star: We’d much rather see a show about Quincy Tyler Bernstine’s Nora Washington, and how she became so disillusioned about the cases she works, even while she continues to help the victims of the cases that cross her desk.

Most Pilot-y Line: The cheese ball scene is a pretty bad one, mainly because the juxtaposition between that line and the rest of the scene is so severe.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Furious can be too glib for its own good, and doesn’t seem to know when to ratchet back the little gags and let the weighty story stand on its own. But we hope those distractions get stripped away as Alice gets closer to catching Catherine.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.