The Deliciously Delirious World of ‘Maniac’

Maniac may turn out to be TV’s strangest, trippiest, most biochemically fantastical love story this year — just when you thought the new other-dimensional love connection in Forever, featuring Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph, owned that distinction.

Emma Stone and Jonah Hill play star-crossed lovers who are put through several ringers and scenarios over the intentionally rambling, multi-narrative course of the Netflix original series. Our romantic sensibilities hope for the best for them even as we are often left scratching our heads in terms of the story’s goings-on. But it’s a happy, hypnotic, binge-impinging, head-scratching sensation, not so far removed from the riddle landscape of Twin Peaks: The Return, which was last year’s strangest, trippiest TV love story.

Playing Annie Landsberg and Owen Milgrim, Stone and Hill are would-be lovers from differing societal corners, plunged into an assortment of fantasy scenarios while under the influence of a wild pharmaceutical offered in a drug trial. After we’re introduced to them in the “real world,” before their trials and hallucinations, the narrative shape-shifting games begin. There they are white-trashy lemur thieves in the “Furs by Sebastian” episode, players in a film noir-ish séance scenario in “Exactly Like You,” and steering a station wagon toward a new dream life in Salt Lake City, all the way to the finale, which makes great use of the iris shot, an old-school cinematic effect from the silent era where the scene blacks out with a tightening circle closing down an image. Through most of the plot twists, they are caught in surreal out-of-body milieus, but always with hints of authentic beating hearts at the core. It all adds up to a tasty bit of television serial delirium, usually of a delicious kind.