Trippy TV
Oscar winner Emma Stone makes her TV debut with the dark comedy miniseries ‘Maniac’, set around a mysterious pharmaceutical trial, streaming in the UAE from today
Last fall, actress Emma Stone, wraith pale and peroxided, sat in a folding chair on a Silvercup Studios soundstage in Queens. She wore a tank top and gray coveralls. Her face, fluorescent-lit, was set in perma-scowl.
“What’s normal, anyway?” she asked the camera throatily.
Good question. Stone, in her first major television role, plays a damaged young woman named Annie in
Maniac, a half-hour limited series, which begins streaming on Netflix today and (really) likes to keep its viewers off-kilter. Just when you’ve found your balance, the rug zooms out from under again. And wait: Where did those elves come from? This is a show with side effects.
“It was kind of important to us that there is no normal,” said the director Cary Fukunaga (True Detective, Beasts of No
Nation), who developed the series with Patrick Somerville, a novelist and a writer and producer of The Leftovers.
Maniac is based, as loosely as a snapped balloon string, on a sweetly absurdist Norwegian series with the same name. The original Maniac, set in a mental hospital, centers on Espen, a schlubby inmate and likely schizophrenic who repurposes his bland surroundings for an active fantasy life in which he imagines himself as a cowboy, a war hero, a superspy. When the producer Michael Sugar bought the rights to the series, he offered it to Fukunaga, who took it because, “I wanted to do something that allowed me to play around with different genres,” he said. (A few of those genres: caper, thriller, fantasy.) He brought on Somerville and they scrapped just about everything — setting, characters, tone. In place of an asylum, they’ve substituted a clinical drug trial. And Espen has morphed into two characters, Stone’s Annie, a depressive and drug addict grieving a family trauma, and Jonah Hill’s Owen, a man estranged from his wealthy clan and a possible schizophrenic. Under the dubious supervision of the toupeed Dr Mantleray (Justin Theroux) of Neberdine Pharmaceuticals and Biotech, participants test a sequence of pills designed to cure any mental illness and “eradicate all unnecessary, inefficient forms of human pain forever.” Results may vary.
The pills, and some “powerful microwave technology,” shunt the participants into dreamlike states where they encounter past traumas and current coping mechanisms.
(Is it all in their heads? Probably.) Annie and Owen, whose psyches have become mysteriously linked, suddenly find themselves as Long Island high school sweethearts or a