‘Maniac’ Episode 1 Recap: Returnal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Maniac is Stranger Things after half a semester at a liberal arts college. It’s back home during Thanksgiving break, first semester freshman year. It’s hanging out at the bar everyone goes to. It’s got you cornered in that bar. It’s monopolizing your time with a solid 15-minute monologue ranking the music videos of Spike Jonze in ascending order of formativeness as your eyes dart around the room, looking for your FWB from last summer or your weed connect or basically any other human being. It’s holding a copy of House of Leaves under one arm, front-cover-side out. It considers itself spiritual but not religious. It thinks cubicles are a metaphor. It has its doubts about Prozac.

What Stranger Things is to the 1980s horror, science fiction, and fantasy milieu reigned over by Spielberg, Carpenter, and King, Maniac — written by The Leftovers veteran Patrick Somerville and directed in its entirety by future James Bond auteur and True Detective Season One-derkind Cary Joji Fukunaga — is to the films of 1999, give or take a year. Instead of doing what the Duffer Brothers did with The Goonies and Ghostbusters and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Somerville and Fukunaga do it with Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Office Space, American Beauty, Magnolia, The Matrix. There’s some Coen Brothers in there too (Barton Fink), some Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), a whole lot of Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), with outliers like Children of Men and Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy thrown in for good measure. If you’re a TV person, and Netflix counts on it that you are, you’ll see shades of Mr. Robot, Legion, and the Adult Swim Infomercials in there too, but that’s not the meat of the thing, nor the point of it. Maniac is as much a product of nostalgia as Stranger Things, only now it’s the stuff you watched when you were 20 rather than 12.

The show’s pilot episode introduces the setting, a world much like our own but more telegenically science-fictional, in a ramshackle analog/digital mashup sort of way. There’s still dogshit in the streets, but it’s cleaned up by roomba-like municipal poop-bots. There’s still an app-based “sharing economy,” but it’s even more intrusive and enervating than Airbnb or Uber: For example, you can use Ad Buddy to pay for goods and services cash-free, in exchange for having to listen to a live human being follow you around reading advertising copy to you for a period of time deemed equivalent to the value of your purchase. You can travel to the moon for vacation, but you still use old DOS-lookin’ desktop computers and paper rolodexes and VCRs and olive-green metal filing cabinets. Advertisements for vaguely dystopian products and companies are as omnipresent here as they are in Children of Men or Her or Mr. Robot or any number of other recent science-fiction works, where such things pop up nearly as frequently as sexy female androids. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t visually striking, impressive in the sheer effort required to pull it off, and frequently very funny. I’d also be lying if I said it didn’t beat you over the head with a baseball bat with the words “LOOK AT ALL THIS WORLDBUILDING WE’RE DOING!” engraved on the barrel.

To the episode’s credit, it introduces its characters in a slightly more roundabout way. It begins with a monologue-montage of CGI psychedelia, in which a narrator links the “infinite cosmic orgy of matter and energy, rubbing, bumping, and grinding together” that led from the Big Bang to the cellular dawn of life on Earth to the importance of human connection. His goal, the narrator says, must therefore be “to eradicate all unnecessary forms of human pain.” It’s like Twin Peaks Season Three Episode Eight reimagined as a pitch for a self-help seminar.

The far-out imagery fades away to a somewhat crass New Yorker cartoon taped to the wall of a bodega, where the as-yet unnamed character played by star Emma Stone has the first of several mildly antagonistic interactions with the world at large before fading into the background for the rest of the episode. Without knowing her any better she sure seems cut from the Helena Bonham Carter Fight Club mode — a manic-depressive pixie nightmare girl with the temperament of a surly tollbooth worker and the appearance of a Lothlórien elf — but at least we get to see her world with her as the focal point first, before she can be filtered through the experience of her male counterpart.

That would be one Owen Milgrim, played by Jonah Hill. Owen is the lone nebbish in the Byrne character’s family of beautiful, callow, extremely wealthy sons and their families; he refuses to accept his father’s financial help, preferring to sleepwalk through and flame out of various dreary dayjobs in an effort to make rent. He’s also an undermedicated schizophrenic, who sees and hears things like ominous subterranean rumblings, which is a problem for his father’s scheme to use him as the key (and false) alibi witness during the trial of his brother Jed (Billy Magnusson) for an unspecified crime involving an “opportunist” woman. Supreme Court, here he comes!

The real plot is very much in the introductory stage, but here are the basics: Owen fields a disorienting offer to make some money by participating in a clinical trial at Neberdine Pharmaceutical Biotech, which is probably about as noble an enterprise as Big Pharma companies are here in our own all-too-real world. Along the way he receives instructions of a sort from Clemson, Jed’s twin brother, whom only Owen can see or hear. (He flickers out of existence in full view of the camera a couple of times, leaving little ambiguity as to his actual presence.)

Clemson says that Owen’s going to save the world, perhaps even the galaxy, provided he a) “keeps trusting the pattern,” as indicated in the tautological codephrase “the pattern is the pattern,” and b) makes contact with his handler, who just so happens to be Stone’s character, whom Owen keeps seeing in ads for all different kinds of products and services before finally meeting her in person at the Neberdine trial, in which she’s participating despite an initial row. When he approaches her, she either plays along to make him go away or is legit in on the thing or has a reaction that’s completely a figment of his imagination. Which is it? That’s the big question.

A bigger one is what will keep you coming back for more after this pilot if the SF worldbuilding stuff doesn’t do it for you. I can’t imagine it’s the performances. Stone is fine, but we’ve seen this role and this interpretation of it before. The same is true of Hill’s sad-sack character, but with him you can really see how little he did with the part beyond making photocopies of similar turns by John Turturro and Edward Norton and Joaquin Phoenix and John Cusack and so on. Jemima Kirke pops up as Jed’s cynical fiancee and feels very much like a character from the Girls Extended Universe, which is not thrilling but nice; Sonoya Mizuno plays stylish scientific genius Dr. Fujimoto, who’s overseeing the pharmaceutical trial, but she’s already reading like more of a collection of reaction gifs than a person.

That’s the problem with the whole thing so far: It’s a bunch of stuff poured into a show-shaped mold more than an actual show. However impressive the design or pleasantly familiar the concepts may be, there’s no sense that something exciting and new is happening here that you might have gotten from the pilot of the very similar Mr. Robot, or even from Netflix’s heretofore most far-out series The OA. It feels like a cosmic orgy of references and sight gags, rubbing, bumping, and grinding together, but there’s no photosynthetic amoeba to show for it just yet.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Maniac Episode 1 ("The Chosen One") on Netflix