The first season of Furious ended the way the Hulu series began: with rage, revenge, shocking twists, and stunning performances. For showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether, shooting those final scenes meant that she could finally get a good night’s sleep.

“I was like, ‘It’s over !’” she says, heaving a sigh that turns into a laugh. “This whole show was really hard for everybody working on it to live in that world for so long.

It’s a dark place to go. But all the actors had unbelievable stamina and fearlessness, just jumping into really tough stuff.”

Meriwether has forged one of the most idiosyncratic careers in Hollywood. While studying at Yale, she began writing short plays like Nicky Goes Goth, starring classmate Zoe Kazan as celebutante Nicky Hilton, and she found Off Broadway success after graduation.

By her mid 20s Meriwether was pitching an ahead-of-its-time TV series called Sluts —a kind of lost precursor to Girls —and the screenplay Fuckbuddies, which became the romantic comedy No Strings Attached. That was followed by quirky network sitcom New Girl , Elizabeth Holmes fictional bio-series The Dropout , and pitch-black comedy Dying for Sex .

Furious, a thriller about a female FBI agent tracking a female serial killer loosely inspired by the 1987 movie Black Widow, was not the most obvious next step for her. But in Meriwether’s hands, the show became a propulsive exploration of both women’s trauma and the misogynistic criminal justice system that’s unfit to deal with it.

Catherine (played by Say Nothing star Lola Petticrew) is a young woman wreaking revenge on men who were complicit in sex trafficking her as a young woman and killing her best friend; the only problem is that Catherine can’t exactly remember what happened to her. Alice (Emmy Rossum) is the agent whose own history of abuse seeps out in disturbing ways—including when she seeks out men to rough her up.

The two women circle each other for much of the series; by the finale, it becomes horribly clear that they have much in common.

Despite the dark subject matter, Furious manages to be both tender and funny, thanks to sharp writing and fluid performances. “My memory sucks, ” Catherine quips at one point.

“It’s because I got strangled so much.” There’s rom-com-style banter between Alice and her colleague Danny (Scoot McNairy), and cynical mentorship from FBI agent Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), who has seen enough to drive her to drink. At the center of it all are two women on opposite sides of the law coming to understand each other.

“They are people who are not easily seen by other people,” Meriwether says. “They really do connect, and it feels like this is their version of a love or a friendship.”

Meriwether is not done wrangling with tales of complicated women: Furious has been renewed for a second season. She’s also recently signed on to write a Britney Spears biopic. She talked to VF about the Furious finale, Britney, and the death of the “likable” woman.