Maniac tells the story of a group of people involved in a bizarre clinical trail.We focus mainly on two subjects and two of the doctors conducting the study. And a slightly insane Artificial Intelligence. Maniac is the kind of show that would have never been made just a few years ago. It’s chock full of special effects, all of them flawless in their execution, and has a story that is a story in the loosest sense of the word.
From the very start we are never sure of that these people live in the real world. There are none of the normal proofs. Fashions and technologies are random. Landmarks are not exactly as they should be. The sets are both futuristic and anachronistic. Reality doesn’t appear to exist as we understand it.
Our heroes, such as they are, join the drug study because they are broken people and the drugs being tested promise to repair them. They take three pills and each pill leads to a different dream world. Nothing good ever happens to any of them.
There is a bit of graphic violence and gore in one episode that would make Quentin Tarantino say ‘Hey, I think you went a little too far there.’ One man has a drill throw blood and gore as his head explodes and another man is blow in half-all fully animated on screen. This is not my idea of fun, even if it was in a dream sequence and didn’t ‘really’ happen.
Jonah Hill and Emma Stone look anorexic and spend most of the ten episodes looking grim or pissed off. The world they live in is right out of a Philip K Dick novel, i.e., nothing good ever happens to anyone and they are always being chased by someone who wants to kill them. A little of this goes a long way.
While I didn’t love Maniac, I didn’t hate it either. There was always something going on and the episodes zipped by quickly. Maybe the silly idea that eventually something would make sense kept me going. Nothing ever makes sense. But that’s kind of the point. Nothing in the real world ever makes any sense either.
