Netflix has released the first full trailer for Cary Joji Fukunaga’s wonderfully strange looking limited series ‘Maniac‘ starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill.
Set in a world somewhat like our world, in a time quite similar to our time, ‘Maniac’ tells the stories of Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone) and Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill), two strangers drawn to the late stages of a mysterious pharmaceutical trial, each for their own reasons.
Annie is disaffected and aimless, fixated on broken relationships with her mother and her sister; Owen, the fifth son of wealthy New York industrialists, has struggled his whole life with a disputed diagnosis of schizophrenia. Neither of their lives have turned out quite right, and the promise of a new, radical kind of pharmaceutical treatment.
That treatment is a sequence of pills which its inventor, Dr. James K. Mantleray (Justin Theroux), claims can repair anything about the mind, be it mental illness or heartbreak. Annie and Owen, along with ten other strangers, are drawn to the facilities of Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech for a three-day drug trial that will, they’re assured, with no complications or side-effects whatsoever, solve all of their problems, permanently… As you might expect, things don’t quite go as planned…
Along with Stone, Hill and Theroux, ‘Maniac’ also stars Trudie Styler, Jemima Kirke and Gabriel Byrne.
The limited series is created by Patrick Somerville (‘The Leftovers’, ‘The Bridge’, ’24: Live Another Day’), and is directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (‘True Detective’). The series is based on the Norwegian television show of the same name by Hakon Bast Mossige and Espen PA Lervaag.
‘Maniac‘ premieres on Netflix on Friday, 21st September 2018.
1 comment
“A world somewhat like our own” – but without any governmental oversight over pharmaceutical research ethics and customer fraud, apparently. (There’s a lot of hurdles and several rounds on animal testing before anything medical is allowed for clinical trials on humans, and such an obvious bullshit “penis enlargement ad” level sales pitch would certainly not pass the FDA or any similar institution in any developed and even semi-democratic country.)
This plot would make a lot more sense in an early 19th century setting, when pharmaceutical trade was wild and completely unregulated and full of snake oil salesmen with no actual training in chemistry or medicine. In Britain and the US, anyway. In German-speaking countries, there were at least the old apothecary guilds making sure that you couldn’t just sell pills without having learned the profession and passed some standardized tests. (This by the way, is why pharmacies and chemists are still separate shops in Germany, because only a university-trained and trade-union-tested pharmacist may sell you anything that’s more impactful than vitamins or mild herbal tisanes, even stuff that doesn’t require a doctor’s prescription.) Not that this guild oversight over individual shopkeepers stopped the early industrial-level pharmaceutical companies bringing stuff like heroin and cocain on the market, mind you.
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