Netflix's 'Maniac' has a surprisingly simple message at its core

Loneliness is the problem. 'Maniac' has the solution.
Loneliness is the problem. 'Maniac' has the solution.

Maniac looked like it was going to be A Lot. The first trailer for the Netflix original made it seem like a Black Mirror–style technological dreamscape, with dubious medical practice and high fantasy sequences woven together in the kind of narrative that spins off dozens of thinkpieces with headlines like “What Is Even Going On In Maniac” and “The Maniac Finale, Explained.”

It’s not one of those shows at all. 

Yes, technically there is medical malpractice and pseudo-reductive futuristic setting, as well as trippy subplots that take place across a number of time periods and fantastical settings, but to its credit Maniac is 100% not out to blow people’s minds with its weirdness. It wants you to enjoy the weirdness as a means to a very simple end. Maniac wants you to make a friend. 

At the core of Maniac is the idea that living is difficult. The show revolves around a human trial for a three-pill regimen that “cures” humans of mental anguish by guiding them through a process that forces them to identify and confront whatever is holding them back from happiness. The creators of the pills posit that to know oneself is to be truly happy and aim to chemically facilitate the kind of self-knowledge that takes humans years to accomplish, if they ever truly do.

Such a medication is an appealing idea, and even more so in the tilted-sideways version of modernity in which the story takes place. It’s the kind of world where rent-a-friend services are a common and accepted part of life, and grieving widows can buy a man to pretend to be their children’s father in a horrifying service called “Daddy’s Home.” The problem with that world (and, let’s be fair, also this one) is a lack of human connection and an epidemic of loneliness. 

When main characters Owen and Annie sign up to be test subjects for the trial, they are both suffering from what they think are specific problems but are in fact side effects of that loneliness. Owen is potentially schizophrenic and terrified of becoming attached to people in case they aren’t real. Annie is consumed by guilt and grief after the loss of her mother and sister. Neither of them have people in their lives to talk to or friends to help hold them together, and their insistence on dealing with their problems privately contributes to their misery.

Maniac presents loneliness as the most fundamental of human problems and uses the disorienting and fantastic to deliver a clear message about a simple solution: it’s easier with friends.

When an accident caused by the lab’s suicidally depressed artificial intelligence system fuses their trials together, Annie and Owen experience the pills’ promised journey of self-knowledge together and are forced to work through an increasingly elaborate morality tales that reveal their fears and flaws. Even when they don’t remember who and where they are, they take on each story as a team and eventually develop a connection where they need it most — in the real world.

Loneliness is the enemy in Maniac. Even when the show presents GRTA, the aforementioned depressed AI computer, as a villain, it later explores the fact that her bad behavior was an extension of her grief over the death of a doctor she fell in love with. Doctors Mantleray and Fujita, who are running the trial, are also fundamentally lonely — Mantleray is a sex addict who never felt loved by his mother and Fujita hides her human desires in a haze of cigarette smoke and cold ambition. 


The “it” in that truth applies to a number of things in the context of Maniac, some bizarrely specific and some broadly applicable. It’s easier to escape from the psychiatric institution your parents placed you in because you told the truth and got your bullshit brother convicted of a sex crime when you have a friend driving the getaway car. It’s also easier to move on from a death in the family or the loss of your life’s work when you have a shoulder to cry on or a lover to run away with.

For all its dancing around the subject of mental illness and bizarre dance sequences, Maniac’s truth is that there is no pill, whirring wall of buttons, or radioactive headgear that can replace the effect of people coming together in friendship. If that sounds cheesy, it’s because it is. That doesn’t mean it’s not real. 


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