In limited series, ‘normal’ not easy to distinguish
Last fall, actress Emma Stone, wraithpale and peroxided, sat in a folding chair on a soundstage at Silvercup Studios in Queens, New York.
The actress 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. In her first major TV role, Stone plays a damaged young woman named Annie in “Maniac,” a halfhour limited series that began streaming Friday on Netflix.
The show likes to keep viewers off-kilter, pulling the rug out from under them time and again. And wait: Where did those elves come from?
“It was kind of important to us that there is no normal,” said 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 very loosely on a sweetly absurdist Norwegian series of 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 producer Michael Sugar bought the rights to the series, he offered it to Fukunaga, who “wanted to do something that allowed me to play around with different genres,” he said. (A few of those genres: caper, thriller, fantasy.)
Fukunaga 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: Annie, a depressive and drug addict grieving a family trauma, and Owen (Jonah Hill), a man estranged from his wealthy family and a possible schizophrenic.
Under the dubious supervision of 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.”
The pills, and some “powerful microwave technology,” shunt the participants into dreamlike states in which they encounter past traumas and current coping mechanisms. Annie and Owen, whose psyches have become mysteriously linked, suddenly find themselves as Long Island highschool sweethearts or a pair of ritzy 1940s grifters. And, yes, in one sequence Stone plays Annie as an elf.
The tone mutates, too, swerving from light to dark, gentle to cruel, loopily surreal to bluntly aggressive. “Maniac” conjures a day-to-day world in which technological advances topped out in the 1970s and society has fractured. The microprocessor never happened; smartphones don’t exist.
New drugs flood the market and — just to put the psycho firmly back in psychodrama — at least one purple koala plays chess in Washington Square Park.
The characters don’t feel comfortable in everyday life. Neither should the audience.
“I want the audience to feel slightly disoriented about what reality is,” Somerville said by phone recently. “I think that’s cool.”