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The Netflix miniseries Maniacal is located in New York, but something about its version of the city feels distinctly. At first, the differences between the real metropolis and that evoked by Cary Joji Fukunaga, better known for leading the first season True detective, are subtle: tiny robots roam the sidewalks to clean dog poop. Lonely people hire actors to impersonate old friends. Things get more and more strange, until the implausibility of a purple koala playing chess barely records. Yet life in the five bizarre neighborhoods remains mostly familiar. In a voice-over that opens the first, Justin Theroux puts forward a hypothesis: "All the worlds that were almost as important as the one we are in." Maniacal-The most exciting new drama on Netflix over the past two years is taking place in one of these parallel realities.
Although they live in a slightly foreign world, the two protagonists of the series are all too human. Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone), who has been hooked on an experimental drug, remains motionless years after a traumatic incident involving her younger sister. Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill), the shy and perhaps schizophrenic black sheep of a powerful family, loses his boring office work. They meet during an inpatient trial administered by the mysterious Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech, both desperate for money and healing to undergo risky tests. Formulated by Dr. James K. Mantleray (Theroux), a scientist who has let his own internal wounds fester, the three-pills course promises to cure all mental illnesses by effectively eliminating psychic pain.
Like so many other recent prestige dramas …Mr. Robot, Legion, Westworld–Maniacal lives at the intersection of psychology, metaphysics and science fiction. But what sets it apart from these series, whose dazzling visuals and complicated scenarios can hide incoherent scriptures, is the way it tackles intoxicating themes without sacrificing narrative momentum or character development. Fukunaga made his name with ambitious films like Sin Number and Beasts of No Nation, and it shows ManiacalEpic scale and fast pace. (The episodes that last about 40 minutes seem particularly fast now that even the basic cables push the hours spent beyond one hour.) Although based on a Norwegian broadcast of the same name, Eternal sun of the spotless spirit, 2001: an odyssey of space and sometimes, Mulholland Drive– all the hallucinating, heartbreaking and witty movies that are so exhilarating to watch.
Fukunaga looks at these parallels. Neberdine's homes have the same retro-futuristic white shine as the interior of 2001The spacecraft of a manipulative computer could be the mother-in-law of HAL 9000. The influence of David Lynch is present in the way the series continues to reshape its tracks in new roles: drugs send Owen and Annie in a series dream quests that look like other familiar stories. The characters marry high school lovers in an absurd robbery film from the 1980s. While he finds himself in a gangster movie, she finds herself in a fantasy tale that combines elements of The Lord of the Rings and The iron Throne.
There is a goal to ManiacalCultural and Alphabetical Surrealism: Her mini-films are metaphors for the unconscious lives of Annie and Owen, two souls blocked by emotional impasses, whose suffering resonates long before they understand why they are suffering. Stone and Hill, who have already shared a screen in the 2007 teen comedy Super bad, show how much they have grown as actors over the past decade, offering the most complex performances of their careers. Owen, in particular, is rapidly evolving from an irritating group of clichés – a sad and privileged under-performer with a savior complex and a compulsion to find meaning in the universe – into a singular and deeply lovable character. .
It is strange to say this about a platform that has only been doing original programming since 2013, but Maniacal represents a welcome return to shape for Netflix. In the beginning, the streaming service seemed to want to compete with creative banner-holders such as HBO and FX, cultivating a small stable of quality shows, at the base of the conversation: House of cards, Orange is the new black, BoJack Horseman, Jessica Jones. In recent years, Netflix has expanded its content to compete with cable television as a whole, more than any channel. This huge effort has generated a surplus of light comedies, documentary series, foreign language recipes, food and design shows, reality franchises and programs for children and teens, as well as many original films and some major misses. .
But this constant stream of content cost the lives of fugitives. When Strange things burst out in the summer of 2016, it demonstrated Netflix's ability to create great unifying cultural moments at a time when everything that seems more controversial than HGTV seems to divide American viewers into political lines. Although it's smarter, darker and more sophisticated than its predecessor, the wild and addictive game Maniacal is the first drama that the service unveiled that offers such a powerful mix of irresistible premises, charismatic distribution and wide appeal. Five years after the launch of Netflix in the era of Peak TV, it's a relief to see that the most prolific player in the media is always concerned about quality.
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