Netflix has released the official trailer for the trippy new series, Maniac, debuting on September 21 2018. The two and a half minute trailer suggests “once you begin to appreciate the structure of the mind, there’s no reason to believe that anything about us can’t be changed. Pain can be destroyed. The mind can be solved.”
The cast of Maniac is led by Oscar winner Emma Stone (La La Land) and Oscar nominee Jonah Hill (The Wolf of Wall Street, Moneyball). Stone and Hill previously starred together in the 2007 R-rated high school comedy Superbad directed by Greg Mottola from a script by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.
Maniac‘s cast also includes Justin Theroux (The Girl on the Train), Oscar winner Sally Field (Places in the Heart, Norma Rae), Julia Garner (The Americans, Ozark), and Jemima Kirke (Girls, The Little Hours).
The series was created by novelist Patrick Somerville. Cary Fukunaga (True Detective, Beasts of No Nation) directed all 10 episodes.
The Plot: 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’s 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—a sequence of pills its inventor, Dr. James K. Mantleray (Justin Theroux), claims can repair anything about the mind, be it mental illness or heartbreak—draws them and ten other strangers 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.
Things do not go as planned.
