I once heard from the lips of a Scottish actor living in LA a story about a panic-inducing 3am phone call he received from his mum. A family tragedy? No. It was that Netflix subscription he’d given her. She was binge-watching Breaking Bad under duress because each episode started automatically after the last and she didn’t how to make them stop.
So there are other reasons to binge besides gluttony. You can do it by accident, clearly. You can also be forced into it out of necessity because a show is so screwy you dare not wait a day (or even an hour) before the next episode in case you lose what little grasp of the plot you already have.
A case in point is Maniac, Netflix’s latest, which throws together Hollywood stars Emma Stone and Jonah Hill in a brain-melting 10-parter about a drug trial that manages to feel totally original and also like a mash-up of Brazil, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Inception. The lavish production design adds to the sense of displacement. We’re in the sort of alternate reality you’d hope you’d get if the costume and set departments were given a blank cheque and a brief to “make the world look like people in the 1980s thought the 2010s would”, to which the writers have added a slathering of black humour and some arch commentary on our own (real) times. So this New York is one in which you can hire a Friend Proxy to pretend to like you or pay for goods using an AdBuddy. That's someone who sits beside you reading out promotional material while you eat or ride the subway. There are also mechanised pooper-scoopers patrolling the pavements and, in episode two, a foul-mouthed, chess-playing koala-bot. In bright purple. I hope we see more of him/it.
And the plot? Owen Milgrim (Hill) is the scion of a wealthy New York family but very much the runt of the litter. He has had mental health problems in the past and is still visited by visions. Sometimes the earth shakes around him, sometimes he sees a character called Grimsson, identical to his own brother Jed, who tells him he’ll save the world and brings gnomic messages such as “the pattern is the pattern”. When Owen enrols in a drug trial he meets Annie Landsberg (Stone), a drug addict with her own personal issues regarding her sister, Ellie, and her own dark reasons for joining the trial. Bolt on a fine crew of helpmates – Girls’s Jemima Kirke as Jed’s pill-popping fiancée, Sally Field voicing a HAL 9000-style computer, Gabriel Byrne as Owen’s father, and ice-cool Sonoya Mizuno as eccentric Dr Fujita – and you have one of autumn’s sure-fire hits. Weird, baffling and audacious by turns, it’s a bravura piece of television from director Cary Fukunaga and bodes well for his next big screen venture: the new Bond film.
Binge on this by all means.
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