There’s something that’s been bothering me about Maniac and I couldn’t put my finger on it until now, but here it is. Creator Patrick Somerville, like co-star Justin Theroux, is a veteran of The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s gorgeous existentialist SFF drama about the survivors of an unexplained mass-casualty event. Once it worked out its first-season kinks, that show blended comedy and tragedy, the supernatural and the quotidian, the real with the surreal as well as any show on the air during its run, and quite possibly ever. It’s a lot like the show Maniac seems to want to be. And for what it’s worth, which is a lot, because looking at beautiful people is one of the great pleasures of both film and television, it starred two very beautiful people, namely Theroux and Carrie Coon.

Then there’s Maniac. Its male lead is Jonah Hill. Its female lead is Emma Stone, who looks like this:

This is not to insult Jonah Hill, who as Owen and his various dream-world doppelgangers is not trying to be some kind of dashing ladykiller — not even now, in an episode set during a 1947 séance at a rich occultist’s mansion. It’s simply to say that stories in which the male lead looks like a normal guy and the female lead looks like a goddamn Tolkien Elf are, more often than not, exercises in self-indulgence by male filmmakers. They feel lopsided, to the point where film criticism has developed terminology to help describe the phenomenon. Casting one of the world’s handsomest men, Theroux, as a weird dork does not help.

I reviewed the ‘40s period-piece episode of Maniac for Decider.

Tags: decider, maniac, reviews, TV, TV reviews

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2018 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.