It comes down to the problem I spotted a few episodes ago: There’s an artlessness to the way this show discusses mental illness, and by extension the human condition. Think of exchanges like this:

Owen: “My mind, it doesn’t work right.”

Annie: “No one’s does.”

Or this:

Owen: “Annie, why are you here?”

Annie: “Because I’m your friend, and that’s what friends do.”

Or think of Owen describing his dilemma: “The same thing happens every time I meet someone, or get close to someone. I mess it up.”

Have all of us thought or said things like this? Yes, and that’s just it: All of us have thought or said things like this. What do we need Maniac for?

If you feel some kind of frisson from hearing actors on a Netflix-prestige show recite vanilla aphorisms about what life is like for people like you, fine, great, cool.

For me? It’s like reading one of those lovely Richard Scarry books for kids, where the little animal people in overalls and jaunty hats drive around a town where everything is labeled: “car,” “street,” “firehouse,” “hat,” “overalls.” It’s a My First Sony version of insight, rounding off all the hard edges of the psychological forces that drive and derange us until they’re so user-friendly that they represent no challenge at all to address or intake.

I reviewed the finale of Maniac for Decider. It wasn’t a good show.

If Maniac isn’t going to take its most serious episode seriously, why should we?

The penultimate episode of Maniac is a mortifying blend of mawkish sentimentality, a lousy Coen Bros pastiche, a shameless Mad Men swipe, and an embarrassing Marvel-style hallway-fight sequence. Thanks, Algorithm! I reviewed it for Decider.

I’ll say this for these past two episodes. First, it’s great, and by Netflix standards positively groundbreaking, that they are two episodes. There’s really no reason for them to be — they’re both set in the same two fantasy worlds created when Annie and Owen ingest the C-pill and tell one continuing story about them from start to finish.

But Maniac is a half-hour dramedy, give or take a few minutes from time to time (mostly take, lately, which is also frankly incredible), and by god they’re sticking to it. Thus what would be a dense hour of TV becomes two breezy sitcom-length installments. It’s amazing how much easier the result goes down. I mean, can you imagine powering through 60 minutes of the fake Lord of the Rings world? Fortunately, you don’t have to!

I’ll say this for these episodes as well: I’m kind of shocked by how much I enjoy Owen’s gangster fantasy, and Jonah Hill’s performance in it. Combine that Soundcloud-rapper look in a mafia environment, which I haven’t seen before, and that weird blend of taciturn and terrified that’s Owen’s default way of interacting with the world, which I also haven’t seen in this context before, and you’ve got something…well, that I haven’t seen before.

That’s the first time Maniac has done anything original. It’s amazing how much easier the show’s magpie tendency to pluck ideas from other films works when there’s something genuinely unusual going on. I mean, the plot mechanics of the gangster fantasy are just remixing The Departed — more so now than ever, with Owen’s lost brother Jed/Grimsson appearing as a deep-cover gangster working with the cops to rescue him at the last minute, and high-ranking guys in the outfit secretly working with the Feds, and all kinds of out-of-nowhere murders and whatnot. But with that oddball take on the rogue-prince gangster archetype at the center, I didn’t mind.

Also, murder on TV is kind of fun sometimes.

And Owen’s date with Olivia, in which they discuss the Gnostic Gospels as a metaphor for how your brain interprets reality and weeds out conflicting data, and in which Olivia reveals she had a paranoid ex-boyfriend who sounds a lot like Owen himself, is a strong scene. Okay, so lines like “For people we’re supposed to love unconditionally, families seem to have a lot of conditions” is some very writerly shit, but oh well. At this point it’s clear I’m never gonna be deeply embedded in this show’s fantasy, so I’ll take whatever blips of enjoyment I can get.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Maniac, aka the one where the epic-fantasy and gangster-movie fantasies end, for Decider. Trying to look on the bright side here.

But at bottom, unless you’re a person who just gets reflexively jazzed the moment men with Noo Yawk accents start talking about loyalty or beautiful people with long hair and grey cloaks take off their hoods and reveal pointy ears, this has nothing to offer. It’s cute, it’s funny, it’s kinda cool sometimes, but why would the key phase of the Mantleray process involve such obvious pop-culture archetypes? There’s one wonderful throwaway bit — heat waves emanate from Olivia, which she explains to Owen by saying her permanently hyperthermic skin maintains a constant temperature of 106 degrees — that points to the creepy fun that can be had with dream logic, but it’s over in an instant. When you’ve got the chance to do anything, anything, why do the same thing you’ve seen before?

I reviewed episode seven of Maniac, aka the one where the epic-fantasy and gangster-movie fantasies start, for Decider. When you’re supposed to be digging deeper into your main characters’ minds than ever before, why would you use massive and obvious pop-culture staples to do it?

The Oedipal scene between the Drs. Mantleray, at least, has the virtue of being kinda funny because it’s so blunt and brutal. But it points to a larger, worrying tendency: the artlessness with which mental illness is discussed on the show.

“For some reason it’s more exciting to tell people I cut than to actually cut,” says one patient, describing an apparent history of self-injury. “You know that movie It’s a Wonderful Life? If that happened to me there would be no difference in the world,” Owen says when asked to describe in his own words what’s “wrong” with him; later he disputes GRTA’s contention that she can cure him by stating flat-out “There’s no cure for schizophrenia.” “She laid in my bed for two months and talked to me about how she wanted to hang herself; I was eight,” James tells Azumi about how his world-famous mother handled his father’s abandonment of the family.

This isn’t writing, as I understand it, in the context of narrative fiction in general or genre fiction in particular. This is just having a character walk up to the camera and describe, in so many words, a thing about a rough part of being alive. For some people this kind of writing seems to hit like a bolt out of the blue, or at least the proliferation of Bojack Horseman screenshots on my Twitter timeline tells me so. The ecstatic reaction to Alex Garland’s Annihilation, which features an exchange in which one character suggests another’s self-injury scars indicate attempts to kill herself and a third says “No, I think the opposite: trying to feel alive” — a truism from the depths of the purplest YA fiction, or an unremarkable real-world therapy session — is another indicator.

I’m bored by it, frankly. When I think of lines from films and television shows about mental illness and suffering that have really moved me, it’s not stuff I’ve heard before cutting a check to my psychiatrist for my co-pay, it’s stuff I’d never thought of before at all, but rang true the moment I heard it. I can still remember exactly how flattened I was when I first heard Boardwalk Empire’s traumatized, murderous World War I veteran Richard Harrow explain why he stopped reading novels after the war: “It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other, but they don’t.” It washed over me like a nightmare, and functioned like a nightmare in that it dredged up fears I hadn’t been courageous enough to face and forced me to stare at them. He didn’t just say “I’m having a hard time enjoying things that once brought me joy” like he’s in a commercial for a new antidepressant. He fucking walloped me. The thrill of recognition is tiny. The thrill of revelation is colossal.

So that’s my problem with Maniac now, even if Justin Theroux is far better playing an unorthodox but effective psychiatrist, as he does in the post-pill interview scenes, than a funny-looking goofball with sex hangups, like he’s forced t everywhere else. There’s no art to it, no faith in the power of genre to use spectacle and the unexpected to articulate truths in a truer way than rote recitation. This despite layer upon layer of fantastical worldbuilding and enough vectors for getting far out — semi-dystopian near future, talking supercomputer, weird clinical environment, psychoactive pills, elaborate fantasy sequences, schizophrenic hallucinations — to sustain several shows, much less just one. Let the pills take hold, man. Let the pills take hold.

I reviewed episode six of Maniac for Decider, and in so doing wrote about the workmanlike way in which shows have begun addressing mental illness. We have therapy and thinkpieces already. Be art!

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.