Netflix's Maniac is brilliant, terrible and obsession-worthy at the same time

The Daily Beast

"Maniac is the most captivating show of the fall season, in that you don’t know for one second what the hell is going on, so you’re constantly paying close attention," says Kevin Fallon. "It’s brilliant in that way. And it’s one of those shows that likes to think it’s brilliant in that way. (It’s insufferable in that way.)" He adds: "The fact that Maniac is so strange is the best thing about it. And, folks, it’s hella strange. But for once, it’s a pleasure for a show to be this narratively ambitious, at a time when production value and budget routinely seem to usurp story development. (Not that Maniac’s deranged alternate past-future—couldn’t say which it’s meant to be—lacks in scope, detail, or cost.) There is a palpable determination in the show’s loopy, provocative world-building and a heartbreaking honesty to its depiction of mental illness."

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• Maniac is a surrealist masterpiece meditation on self-fulfilling prophecy and self-sabotage and self-loathing and self-doubt and… self itself
• It is more fun to describe than experience: "Maniac asks big questions about reality, and then settles for the limpest possible cinematic representations of that reality"
• Maniac becomes emptier and emptier the more you watch: It's engineered to appease the short attention spans that led to Big Moment TV
• Maniac is exhilarating to watch and a lot to process, especially with its full embrace of utter randomness
• Maniac inverts TV's format as a writer's medium, allowing Cary Fukunaga to make it an unfettered, trippy visual joy
• Maniac makes it work going from dark sci-fi story to compelling drama to black comedy within minutes
• Fukunaga has outdone his work on True Detective, making a show that's as hard to pin down as Westworld
• Maniac is a combination of The Leftovers, Archer, Inception, Legion and Mr. Robot
• Fukunaga is charming yet can be an implacable person to work with, driving his staffers insane
• Creator Patrick Somerville has always been fascinated by the mind -- his wife is a psychotherapist, his dad is a neurologist
• Emma Stone and Jonah Hill talk about reuniting after Superbad and playing multiple characters
• Billy Magnussen admits he plays a "colorful douchebag"
• Justin Theroux says the Maniac cast got through filming by binge-watching The Hills
• Inside the creation of Theroux's "Sucktube" character