MANIAC
Meet TV’s weirdest new show. If anyone can remove the Flashdance soundtrack earworm from SFX Towers we’d be very grateful.
Ever since Superbad hit cinemas 11 years ago, Jonah hill and emma stone have been searching for a project that would buddy them up once again on screen. But it’s fair to say that Maniac isn’t Superbad II or anything even vaguely like it. a dizzily psychedelic black comedy set, in netflix’s words, “in a world somewhat like our world, in a time quite similar to our time”, Maniac is the streaming goliath’s latest event series, and it’s good, it’s damn good.
type Maniac into netflix’s search engine and up will pop the bruise-black norwegian laugh-fest that was the scantly budgeted inspiration for this ritzy reimagining. truth be told, though, the original series has even less to do with this new show than the BBc House Of
Cards or the 1960s Lost In Space had with their super-moneyed remakes. so when netflix approached True detective director cary Fukunaga about giving Maniac an americanaccented makeover, the californian-born emmy-winner was clear that this had to be a very different interpretation.
“For one thing, the original show took place in this mental hospital in norway,” says Fukunaga to SFX, “but in the United states, mental hospitals are pretty frightening, you can’t really make jokes about that.”
MAD WORLD
Maniac tells the story of two people, both of whom are drawn to the latter-day stages of a mysterious pharmaceutical trial. annie Landsberg (stone) is brittle and directionless, at odds with the world and herself, and hungry to get her mitts on any drug that can snuff out the memory of what she did to her sister (wait and find out…). Owen milgrim (hill), meanwhile, is the son of wealthy new york industrialists, struggling every day with what appears to be acute schizophrenia (he has visions and imagines himself to be the saviour of the world). When both of them hear word of a revolutionary drug trial that promises to repair anything and everything about the mind, they want in like a rat lusts a drainpipe.
the first Fukunaga heard about Maniac was when producer michael sugar (13 reasons
Why) approached him with the idea of redoing this relatively obscure scandi comedy-drama.
“he asked me if i wanted to do a series where we mess with multiple genres and play with different worlds in a delusional way,” the director says. “i was intrigued. i didn’t get a chance to see the norwegian show before we started moving forward with it, it was more the blank canvas of being able to work with one of my favourite actors locally in new york and play around with a bunch of genres.”
Fukunaga touched base with a swarm of wannabe writers, eventually choosing novelist and short-story writer Patrick somerville. “he just seemed like a perfect fit,” the director says. together they began brainstorming, bullseyeing with the idea of relocating the drama from the floors of a mental health
Things are abouT To geT deeply weird in The sideways world of new neTflix show maniac . sTeve o’brien probes The mind of direcTor cary fukunaga