_This review contains spoilers for all of the Netflix miniseries “Maniac.”_
On Sept. 21, Netflix dropped the highly-buzzed-about show “Maniac.” The following weekend, I binged the entire season in a day, and loved every second of it.
The show, marketed as a mini-series, stars actors Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, and has appearances by Justin Theroux and Sally Field.
It follows Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill) and Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone). Owen is a schizophrenic who struggles as an alienated fifth son of a rich and irritating New York family. Annie suffers from a broken family, a dead sister and an addiction to a pill that can temporarily bring her back. The two are drawn to a late-stage pharmaceutical trial that promises, in a three-day trial, to solve all their problems.
“Maniac” is set in a world similar to our own, but with small yet strange changes such as a new form of payment that involves someone sitting next to you and listing advertisements, called ‘Ad Buddy.’ The technology around them is all dated, yet the capabilities of the three pills provided in the trial (the A, B and C pills, respectively) is far more powerful than anything today.
The A pill, and the reason Annie was led to the trial as it held her under its thrall, provides you with one thing: to relive the worst day of your life. For Owen, it brings him back to a particularly difficult dealing with his schizophrenia, portrayed as a hallucinated look-alike of his brother called Grimsson (Billy Magnussen). In it, he experiences what he calls a blip, or a brief period of psychosis. During a study date with a crush, he hallucinates Grimsson telling him that the girl was paid off by his parents in order to date him, and he screams her away. This is clearly a point of great regret for him, and leads him to isolate himself from everyone he seems to get close to so as to not experience such an event again. For Annie, it lets her remember her last day with her sister Ellie (Julia Garner), where she argues with her the entire time as she makes the descent to Salt Lake City, leaving Annie behind in New York City. This ends with, mildly predictably, a truck coming from the opposite side of the road to hit them, with only Annie escaping alive.
These are the two recurring themes and problems for the characters that appear throughout the show, sometimes subtly but usually rather overtly. It feels at times they don’t allow you to realize some of the subtler connections yourself, but sometimes in a show with such trippy themes as taking pills and ending up in someone else’s brain to have dual mind fantasies. A little overtness is good.
They next take the B pill, which allows the previously mentioned mind fantasies to occur. Unlike the A pill, when they journey into their own heads, they see fictions that they use to better understand their problems instead of past happenings. In these mind fantasies, we’re taken to two places with our leads, mostly populated by people that briefly appear in the real world. In the first, and my favorite episode of the series, Linda (Emma Stone) and Bruce (Jonah Hill) are a married couple with children from Long Island in the ‘90s. They are tasked with retrieving a stolen illegal lemur from a furs shop that they must deliver to the estranged daughter of Linda’s recently deceased patient, whom she cared for as her nurse. In the next, they are a seperated couple of con artists who meet at a seance to steal a lost chapter of Don Quixote.
The ridiculousness of both these scenarios is not lost on me, but if they were played any less masterfully than by impeccable leading woman Emma Stone, I probably would have chalked the whole thing up to being too ridiculous and contrived. Instead, I find myself in love with how the actors make any role their own, having you believe you’re watching something else entirely for a moment. In these fantasies, they encounter not just each other, but those from their past who cause them grief — Annie meets the mother of the man who crashed into her and killed her sister, and Owen meets the girl, Olivia (Grace Van Patten), who he screamed at during his blip. Owen and Annie also grow to bond with each other, as none of the other patients share the fantasies together as they do.
Finally, they take the third and last of the pills, the C or “confrontation” pill. Yet again, they play different roles, but separate this time– until they realize how to get over, and confront, their obsessions with the people who plague them. Annie learns to let go of her sister and accept her death, and Owen learns to stop dwelling over the poor girl who’s likely forgotten his mistakes. They learn to be a happier version of themselves, briefly, until the computer that runs a majority of the system, called GRTA (or affectionately, “Gertie” by her creators), traps them longer in her depressed, vengeful state. Did I forget to mention the robot has feelings and became depressed after the scientist she fell in love with died? The show just gets trippier and trippier, somehow. Yet still not confusing, which is something very refreshing! Sometimes a show just deserves to be enjoyed, without the requirement of overthinking every minute detail.
After a hilarious showing by Jonah Hill as an Icelandic diplomat named Snorri who suffers from a poor accent and a poor bit of intelligence, which I could tell was played with as much enjoyment as could be imagined, they finally manage to get out of the simulations after confronting GRTA and leave the drug trial. Feeling more confident in their real lives, Annie and Owen decide to change themselves for the better. In a more serious court trial, Owen refuses to lie for his brother on the stand and is then forcefully committed into a mental facility for betraying his family. Annie has a talk with her father and decides she needs to go to Salt Lake City, the place where she journeyed to previously with her sister. She breaks Owen out of the facility, ignoring his continued worries about growing close to people, and the two giddily take to the road, finding comfort in each other.
This show was an easy, fun and enjoyable watch. As a person who’s not a big fan of the common trend of having interesting shows being difficult to comprehend for a casual viewer, I found “Maniac” rather refreshing. It still felt interesting and compelling even with overt themes, mostly by the stellar acting by stars Emma Stone and Jonah Hill. In the era of streaming television, I am glad to see Netflix step up and become such an impressive giant of a service that is constantly putting out enjoyable pieces. Thanks for making a pill that wasn’t so hard to swallow.
_Edited by Siena DeBolt | sdebolt@themaneater.com_
