‘Maniac’ Episode 4 Recap: Escape from Long Island

There’s a bit early on in “Furs by Sebastian,” the mildly amusing fourth episode of Maniac on Netflix, that got on my nerves as a lifelong Long Islander, taking me to a level I always forget I have inside me until some offworlder sets it off. With the same ostentatious ATTENTION TO DETAIL it’s displayed in constructing its retro-futuristic “real” world, the show takes us to a Long Island of the mind, in this case the mind of Owen Milgrim. (And quite possibly Annie Landsberg too; more on that in a bit.) After taking the B-pill as part of Neberdine’s clinical trial, Owen has subconsciously recast himself as Bruce, a mullet-sporting jersey-wearing Volvo-driving resident of a stripmall suburb in the ’80s. In this fantasy, Annie is Linda, his no-nonsense hospice-worker wife.

They’re on the trail of an exotic and illegal lemur stolen from one of her dying patients, and utilizing quick instincts and shrewd detective techniques — she wrote down the license plate of the van used by the thieves as she watched them speed away, then went to the DMV and got their address by reading it from a computer screen’s reflection off a DMV clerk’s big-ass glasses — they’ve got their man. (Men, as it turns out, but more on that in a bit too.)

As they pull out of the DMV parking lot, a Long Island Rail Road train traverses an overpass in the background. The problem is that while everything — the hairstyles, the cars, the storefronts, the billboards, the jeans (oh god, the acid-washed jeans), and the music (“Close (To the Edit)” by Art of Noise for pete’s sake) — screams ’80s, the train is an M7 model, which didn’t debut on the line until the 2000s. The red-on-black LED readout of the next stop on the cars’ exteriors is the tell. Real LIRR heads know we shoulda been looking at M1s or M3s, with their distinctive subway-style double doors and gross leather-and-wood interiors. Bruce and Linda, sharp cookies that they are, would have smelled a rat from the start.

Is this the most picayune criticism I’ve ever lobbed at a show? Absolutely. But when you’ve got a petard, you’d better prepared to be hoisted by it. Maniac‘s painstaking attempts to recreate the look and feel of the Reagan Era — even during its present-day material, with its blend of smartphones and clunky old computers — often substitute for it having anything particularly interesting or innovative to say about technology, time, or humans’ interface with either. As they say on Law & Order, you opened the door, counselor.

Anyway, this short, nearly sitcom-length episode is entertaining enough to get by. There’s an appearance by the great Glenn Fleshler — aka the Yellow King from True Detective, aka George Remus from Boardwalk Empire, aka Orrin Bach from Billions — as the owner of the titular fur shop, which he operates as a front for various nefarious animal-trading activities with his two failsons, who are part of a dance troupe when they’re not being disgusting or holding hostages at gunpoint. Because them dancing is zaaaaany, see??

Most of the gags in what I assume is supposed to be a very funny episode are in a similar vein — they’re not so much jokes as they are joke-shaped, or joke-adjacent. All the cornball ’80s and Lawn Guyland stuff, for example. The American-flag sweatpants, which are straight out of Napoleon Dynamite. The dancing, which when you add in the ’80s schtick is a bit Donnie Darko SparkleMotion. The lemur, which hearkens back to that odd period where movie comedies thought nothing was funnier than weird exotic animals. NBC/Michael Schur single-camera sitcom-style recurring tics like Bruce saying “fudge” instead of “fuck,” or a Fish and Wildlife officer getting his back up when asked if he’s a cop or not (“there’s not much of a difference, authoritywise”), a bit the filmmakers thought was so nice they did it twice. Jonah Hill and Emma Stone both have actual comedy chops, but you wouldn’t know it here.

Only an out-of-nowhere bit of grossout “splatstick” humor, in which one of the failsons gets shot full of holes at great length like he’s Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, took me by anything close to surprise. But even there cowriters Patrick Somerville and Nick Cuse gilded the lily by having his last word be “Crisp!”, which was the brothers’ adjective of choice for a particularly well-executed dance routine. In a way it’s good that the James Bond franchise seems intent on becoming as dour as possible, because incoming director Cary Joji Fukunaga is not gonna fool anyone into thinking he’s Mel Brooks here, that’s for sure.

But! It’s a damn shame Fukunaga seems to have run screaming from the horror career he might have had after the macabre first season of True Detective — ankling the high-profile adaptations It on the big screen and The Alienist on the small one — because there are some genuinely unnerving moments here. At one point while Bruce reads a self-help book by Dr. Greta Mantleray (Sally Field, seen and heard but never in person), a captioned photo is revealed to be “Olivia Meadows, emotional poltergeist, who screamed at you during your BLIP.” At that moment a truck roars past, unexplained and alarming. There’s a strange fraying-at-the-edges quality to the moment that’s hard to shake.

There’s more where that came from, too. When Linda finally rescues the lemur and delivers it to her patient’s estranged daughter, the daughter reveals that the animal is actually an elaborate fuck-you from beyond the grave, producing as evidence a posthumous letter in which the mom explains why lemurs are better than having children, a mistake the mom made with the daughter that she nastily instructs the younger woman not to repeat herself. “Maybe she’s right,” Linda says, suddenly distraught and seemingly not quite in control. “Maybe you shouldn’t have children.” It seems completely out of the blue, and it is, but for the fact that the woman is pregnant with a son she plans to name “Greg Nazlund” — the name of the truck driver who killed Annie’s sister. It’s a holdover from the real world, and it’s erupting into the fantasy like psychic pus. The whole thing feels very end-of-Twin-Peaks-Season-Three, and for once it’s more a spiritual kinship than a swipe.

This happens again on the car ride home from the daughter’s place, as she talks to Bruce about the day she came home and found her father crying because her mother had left them, and how she decided to lead her sister away from the scene to give her a few more hours of happiness before the poor kid had to face the worst. “When did they get back together?” Bruce asks, confused. “Your parents aren’t divorced.” She’s telling a story from her other life, and has no idea why.

Finally, as the Fish and Wildlife cops pull up to arrest Bruce at home (they got his license plate as he sped away; sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander I guess), he looks across the street and sees a strange man, possibly the phantom brother who always appears to Owen in his moments of psychosis in the real world, parked in a black car across the street. That’s it — the episode ends. That’s the good weird, not the Legion/American Gods bullshit that passes for weird on too much TV, Maniac included. I have very little hope the show is, like, learning its lesson or something, but I’ll take what I can get.

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 4 ("Furs By Sebastian") on Netflix