Maniac Isn’t as Smart as It Thinks It Is—But It’s Still a Good Time

Netflix’s nutty new drama has plenty of flaws, but it’ll win you over in the end.
movie still of a man hugging a wall
Michele K. Short/Netflix

I’ll be honest: I’m getting tired of shows like Maniac. There was a time when a prestige drama starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, which plays like a three-way crossover between. Inception, Brazil, and FX’s Legion, would have sounded unmissable. But as you’ve probably noticed, there’s a lot of prestige-y TV out there these days. Much of it is good. Almost none of it is great. The bar has been raised, and there are too many TV shows that receive outsized praise when they barely manage to clear it.

Maniac is a show that could lazily be described as "ambitious" or "bold" or "unconventional" but its ambitions and boldness and unconventionality are squarely within the boundaries of prestige television. Is there an ornate introductory sequence that juxtaposes the show’s narrative with the Big Bang? Yes (and it ends with the argument that “all souls are on a quest to connect"). Is there a lot of pointed cultural satire about how technology might actually be ruining our lives? Yes (and if I were in middle school it would probably have blown my mind wide open). Is there a lot of visual trickery designed to make viewers wonder what’s real and what isn’t? Yes (and if you’re sensitive you probably shouldn’t get high before watching it). Does everything look incredibly expensive? Yes (and I’m sure it was). Is there a long, showy tracking shot? Yes (and that’s what you pay a Cary Joji Fukunaga for)!

So it’s with begrudging credit that I can say Maniac annoyed the hell out of me before it finally, in the end, either won me over or wore me down. Maniac is never as original or daring as it thinks it is, but it is impeccably crafted, and it always held my attention.

What is this show, anyway? Here’s the best I can explain without spoiling anything big. Maniac is set in a kind of parallel-universe, contemporary-ish New York City. Jonah Hill plays Owen Milgrim, the long-overlooked son of a wealthy family, who may or may not be schizophrenic. Emma Stone plays Annie Landsberg, a caustic addict near the top of what looks to be an impending downward spiral. Both sign up for an in-patient pharmaceutical trial in which they’ll be given a series of pills that promise, in the end, to cure the troubles and pains of anyone who takes them. About half of the show takes place in the real world. The other half takes place in the hallucinatory world induced by the pills, where Owen and Annie take on new identities in a series of surreal adventures with allegorical connections to the problems they need to solve.

You can see how Maniac assembled such top-tier talent, from director Fukunaga—hired, just yesterday, to helm the next James Bond movie—and stars Stone and Hill, who boast four Oscar nominations (and one win) between them. As a creative opportunity, Maniac must have seemed both tremendously challenging and tremendously fun. The show’s elastic premise allows everyone to wear a bunch of hats—particularly Stone and Hill, who get the chance to try out a bunch of wild costumes and accents. In one episode, Stone plays a femme fatale opposite Hill’s quick-witted safecracker; in another, Hill plays a sensitive goober at the center of a global scandal while Stone plays an amnesiac secret agent who proves ludicrously deadly with a pistol. (And those are two of the most normal scenarios Maniac offers; I’ll leave you to discover the crazier transformations for yourself.)

Those fantasy sequences are the real meat of Maniac, and both Stone and Hill are terrific in them. Stone is chameleonic, convincingly shifting through costumes and time periods while offering the occasional glimpse of Annie’s bitterness underneath. Hill’s performance is flatter, but that suits his character, whose depression is so all-consuming that it seeps into nearly every persona he assumes.

And it’s undeniably fun to watch Owen and Annie embark on these nutty capers with deadly seriousness. But the problem with situating so much of your show in a dreamland is that so much of your show doesn’t actually matter. Maniac tries to make it clear that these elaborate fantasy scenarios have significant implications for the real world, with funhouse-mirror versions of actual people and problems from Owen and Annie’s lives popping up in supporting roles. And it’s interesting to contemplate how much of Owen and Annie’s relationship develops while they’re in the throes of hallucination, making it an open question how much they actually know each other. But the series is slick and glib enough that those questions are often pushed aside for the next hyper-stylized sequence set in '80s Long Island, or a seance in 1947, or a Kubrickian medical lab, or a Kubrickian bomb shelter. (Seriously, these guys love Kubrick.)

In a welcome change for Netflix’s often bloated dramas, the episodes top out around 45 minutes, and many run closer to 30. But it still feels like Maniac is padded out with a few needless subplots and characters. Justin Theroux is clearly having a blast playing a skeevy doctor with a paralyzing Oedipus conflict—but none of his crazy flourishes and tics can redeem the character’s arc, which keeps throwing spaghetti at the wall in a failed effort to distract from thin material. As Theroux’s overbearing mother—and also the voice of a computer with more emotions to sort out than many of these characters—Sally Field is great. Of course she is! She’s Sally Field! But you can admire a performance while wondering why the material isn’t doing more to serve it.

You can feel that same problem in the basic structure of Maniac, which frantically juggles characters, stories, and genres. The good news is that you’ll never be bored for long. The bad news is that Maniac never really settles down long enough to achieve any kind of catharsis. By the time the series ends, the characters have been through an emotional wringer—but with rare exceptions, I never felt I was there along with them.

And that brings us to the Netflix Test, which is something different altogether: If I were sitting around binge-watching on a lazy weekend, would I let Netflix start playing the next episode? Or, once the credits popped up, would I click back to the main menu and watch the new seasons of BoJack Horseman or American Vandal or the dozens of other new TV shows vying for my time? Honestly, if Netflix hadn’t sent all 10 episodes—and if I weren’t professionally obligated to watch them—I probably wouldn’t have bothered with finishing Maniac. But now that I have finished it, I’m not sorry I did. So who am I to turn you away from it?