Maniac – Review

Showrunners: Cary Joji Fukunaga and Patrick Somerville

Episodes: 10

Netflix’s Maniac has—temporarily, at least—proven that Netflix still has the means to make stellar television when it really wants to. A high-concept retro-futuristic comedy-drama, Maniac delves into the alluring prospect of “solving” the human mind and all of the hideous implications that come with it.

The series follows the interwoven stories of Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill) and Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone). Owen is the black sheep of a rich New York family, struggling with the pressure of testifying and fabricating an alibi on behalf of his brother Jed—complicated by the fact that Owen suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and frequently sees a doppelganger of Jed, the mustachioed Grimmson, who insists that Owen is destined to save the world. Meanwhile, Annie (Emma Stone) is a drug-dependent vagrant with a deeply traumatising past. Their paths cross when they gravitate towards the enigmatic Neberdine pharmaceutical trial, which promises a cure to mental illness and trauma through the intersection of experimental drugs and an advanced AI trained in psychiatry. What could possibly go wrong?

Two episodes in, I had no idea where the show was going—the premise and characters were intriguing, but the overall thrust of the series seemed undefined. Luckily, the introduction of Dr. James K. Mantleray (Justin Theroux) in episode three, whose every action seems to be an ethical violation of some sort, brings the series’ core into sharp focus. Mantleray is the original mind behind the experiment, a neurochemist intent on solving the human mind and its inconveniences. It’s no coincidence that Mantleray can barely walk two feet without tripping over his own deeply ingrained mother issues—or that the advanced AI is based on his mother’s personality, and that he has personal issues with it as well. Add to this that the computer is on the cusp of developing sentience and has become horribly depressed, and we’ve got a show on our hands.

Refreshingly, Maniac doesn’t get lost in its high-concept premise. The “reflection” sequences—chemically induced dreams monitored by the AI that explore the subjects’ trauma, analyse their defence mechanisms, and provoke a healthy resolution—mostly feel like productive interpretations of the characters’ traumas and thought patterns, adding some insight through clever generic parallels or moments of lucid reflection.

But the concept doesn’t hold up in every instance; Annie’s fantasy genre reflection in episodes seven and eight is for me the series’ least compelling divergence from reality. If Joseph Campbell has taught us anything, it’s that you can fit any story into a generic fantasy or folklore structure without any meaningful implications for its themes or content. Out of all of the reflections, this one seems the most like a re-skin of events we’ve already seen. While it has its fun moments, and it does transition into an interesting narrative moment between Annie and the AI, it also feels like wasted potential in a series with such a limited run-time.

But despite its minor blips, Maniac has enough gravity to pull its array of disparate reflections into something cohesive. Much of this is due to the directorial input of Cary Fukunaga, who pulls off an impressive exhibition of genre homages, from gangster flick to spy thriller, while also giving the requisite weight to the rich human moments that occur within and out of the simulation.

The series’ successful cohesion is also in part due to Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, who are endlessly compelling as Owen and Annie and their many reflections. Both are given ample opportunity to flex their dramatic talents while also drawing on the comedic chops that brought them to the public eye. (Hill’s “Snorri”, an Icelandic public official immersed in an intergalactic scandal, makes for a particularly inspired performance.) And yet Justin Theroux still manages to be a constant scene-stealer—from his awkward instructional video to his hysteria-induced fit of blindness, Mantleray’s Freudian mess of a personality is a wonderfully entertaining and absurd reflection of the series’ premise.

It does feel at times like there’s a tension between Hills’ and Stone’s star power and the direction that the story wants to go. It almost starts to seem like Owen and Annie are just case studies in a larger conflict between Mantleray, his research, and his mother. The final two episodes take great strides to bring Owen and Annie back to the forefront, but while they carve out the lion’s share of the story’s resolution for themselves, I feel like there’s a thread missing between their experiences and the larger conflict of the series.

Ultimately, though, this may just be me falling into the same trap as Mantleray and many film and television critics before me: sometimes television art just isn’t solvable past a certain point. There are enough recurring, morphing details in this series to drive even a sensible viewer to manic mid-episode note-taking, yet most of the connections resolve into narrative white noise. All I can say for sure is that Maniac provides a well-executed and deeply human story rooted in a fun, yet effective, premise.