Netflix’s Maniac is a fascinating, brilliant show, and one of my favorites of 2018. We should expect no less from the creative voices behind “The Leftovers” and “True Detective,” but this show still found a way to surprise me episode after episode. ... Maniac plays with genre and dramatic expectations to gain insight into the human condition in ways that other programs can’t touch.
Maniac, for its part, throws down a tale that swerves to the left and swerves to the right without ever losing velocity. But seeing is believing while not believing what you’re seeing is also part of the experience.
This is a show that will appeal to people who have done a great deal of work to understand their own dysfunction. Everything from mental health, to mental health services, to big pharma and onward is covered in here. The way in which we come to understand the characters and their complicated relationships is brilliant and there isn't enough praise for how the framing of these serious issues still carries with it just enough humor to keep it palatable.
5 Episodes into this and you'll find yourself with an afterfeeling from a George Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four read or if you dont know how that feels then Walter Murch's movie Return to Oz back in 1985. It's thoughts and ideas either folks who study human behavior or people who have even the minute semblance to each unique plot per episode may appreciate this more. I've watched 4 episodes straight on the 2nd instance I got a chance. Apt choice of cast with the sensitivity of content supported by the actors' past characters portrayed leading them a true fit for this series.
Maniac is one of the year’s most refreshing series and a series that always seems 10 seconds away from declaring, “The most complicated computer of all is the human mind.” It’s hypnotizing eye candy that won’t completely nourish the brain or the soul, but it will satiate them for a little bit.
Maniac is inventive and well-paced enough (the episodes clock in at a welcome 40 minutes or less) to breeze past its missteps. ... In an age of desiccated puzzle-stories, Maniac puts emotion first, even at the risk of sentimentality. It’s a heart-shaped Rubik’s Cube, a funny, consistently surprising fable of broken machines trying to reassemble themselves.
There’s a fusion here between modern melancholia and those romps where potential lovers keep encountering one another in skips through time, which sounds tedious but works somewhat splendidly, once the series gets going. ... Hill and Stone are both terrifically capable at conveying the series’s many moods, while Theroux looks especially grateful to be hamming it up after so much deeply-furrowed frowning in “The Leftovers.”
When Maniac is good, it’s funny, affecting, and fascinating; when it’s not good, it’s like having a conversation with a student in a Psych 101 class who wants to tell you about a dream they had last night and what it might mean. It leaves the series as a rambling journey that some will find charming and others frustrating.
Promising themes dissolve, episode by episode, into something more like forced quirkiness, revealing a buried conventionality, the curse of way too much cool-looking TV. ... Even an unreal world needs characters who make sense, particularly in a series that is as gooily devoted to exploring those characters’ inner lives as Maniac turns out to be. On this level, the show is half-baked and inconsistent.
A great show that's happy to be quirky and original. It kept things strange and uncertain but never failed to deliver on answers. Great acting by the leads. Understandably not for everyone but a show that I'll remember for a long time to come.
Bravo to anyone who was able to commit the time. Me, I cannot commit to something that takes 3 HOURS to begin its story. Sorry, this might have been good but I just didn't care after the first few episodes.
This is one of the worst TV shows of this year.
If you would replace Emma and Hill with random people, this would be a consensus. But they both put up incredibly good performances and this gives the show a false sense of credibility
The show tries to appear smart by creating an absurd world and factor in the mental disease. These, in fact, are just baseless constructs in a desperate attempt to add substance to this mess.
It looks low budget (allegedly is a deliberate thing, but it just looks bad since there is no deeper reason to adopt the style), the camera angles are "deliberately" bad, secondary characters make no sense, sound effects are generally lacking thus the atmospheric feel too.
So if you watched it, you are confused by how horrible it was, but feel the peer pressure to say it was fine or to appear smart, please don't give in. It looks silly