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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
18
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
RogerEbert.comSep 20, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Netflix’s Maniac is a fascinating, brilliant show, and one of my favorites of 2018. We should expect no less from the creative voices behind “The Leftovers” and “True Detective,” but this show still found a way to surprise me episode after episode. ... Maniac plays with genre and dramatic expectations to gain insight into the human condition in ways that other programs can’t touch.
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Sep 19, 2018
Season 1 Review:
It is wild, audacious, addictive, and teeters so precariously between reality and fantasy that the audience will immediately question what’s real and what isn’t. The bold ten-episode series, one of the fall season’s best, repeatedly bounces in and out of its characters’ brains and hop-skips from genre to genre, yet somehow avoids spiraling out of control even when what transpires detours further into WTF-ville.
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Sep 13, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Maniac is a crescendo across genres that doesn’t stop building. ... Its power comes, in part, from its refusal to sprawl. As a trial of something new, Maniac passes every test, and ascends instantly to take its place among the very best TV of the year. Its eagerness to expose unexpected angles is its great gift.
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Sep 20, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Stone and Hill are skilled, magnetic actors who ground the series even at its most absurd. ... In Maniac, form follows function, and as its heroes reckon with the confusing beauty of their own minds, the viewer reckons with the strange allure of this oddball TV show.
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Sep 19, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Maniac is one of the year’s most refreshing series and a series that always seems 10 seconds away from declaring, “The most complicated computer of all is the human mind.” It’s hypnotizing eye candy that won’t completely nourish the brain or the soul, but it will satiate them for a little bit.
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The Daily BeastSep 20, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Few shows are laid out this intricately or methodically, and the callbacks as the series progresses are gratifying and worth the effort of paying attention. This goes for Fukunaga’s winking, sumptuous direction; Stone and Hill’s challenging, ultimately miraculous performances; and Somerville’s tangled scripts. The process of uncoiling the knots might piss you off, but achieving it in the end feels like an accomplishment. Even if the achievement ends up being not as profound as you thought it might be.
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Sep 20, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Maniac is inventive and well-paced enough (the episodes clock in at a welcome 40 minutes or less) to breeze past its missteps. ... In an age of desiccated puzzle-stories, Maniac puts emotion first, even at the risk of sentimentality. It’s a heart-shaped Rubik’s Cube, a funny, consistently surprising fable of broken machines trying to reassemble themselves.
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Sep 19, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Your results may vary depending on how important it is to you to have mental illness, grief, unhappiness and other important Big Ideas fully explored via characters you come to love. This theory will be put to the test in the middle stretches of the 10-episode run of Maniac, where Fukunaga truly gets unleashed. It's there where aesthetics tend to win over sustained attention to the core issues of the series--but there's no denying that it's hard to look away from almost any portion of what's going on.
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Sep 13, 2018
Season 1 Review:
There’s a fusion here between modern melancholia and those romps where potential lovers keep encountering one another in skips through time, which sounds tedious but works somewhat splendidly, once the series gets going. ... Hill and Stone are both terrifically capable at conveying the series’s many moods, while Theroux looks especially grateful to be hamming it up after so much deeply-furrowed frowning in “The Leftovers.”
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Sep 28, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The conclusion of Maniac is only slightly ambiguous, and testifies clearly to the simplified truth that embracing human connectivity opens a person up to the power of healing. This saccharine conclusion fits the series, which, while impressive for its detailed and certainly imaginative world building, rarely dares to truly confound its audience--or challenge us with an assessment of mental health that doesn’t amount to hallmark sentimentality.
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ColliderSep 13, 2018
Season 1 Review:
When Maniac is good, it’s funny, affecting, and fascinating; when it’s not good, it’s like having a conversation with a student in a Psych 101 class who wants to tell you about a dream they had last night and what it might mean. It leaves the series as a rambling journey that some will find charming and others frustrating.
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Sep 21, 2018
Sep 21, 2018
Season 1 Review:
A big, weird, tightly controlled mess of a show. It swings for the bleachers and doesn't always connect--and when it does, it can seem to skip some bases or run them out of order. But it does keep swinging and running. ... But Stone, an actress of alchemical gifts--she can turn lead to gold--is marvelous at every turn, in every version and inversion of her character.
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Sep 13, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Where The Leftovers successfully turned supporting roles into three-dimensional showcase star turns, this series reduces even the major characters to bare backstory essentials, poses of emotion. ... For all its manic poses and deflationary snark, it’s ultimately patronizingly sentimental.
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Sep 20, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Promising themes dissolve, episode by episode, into something more like forced quirkiness, revealing a buried conventionality, the curse of way too much cool-looking TV. ... Even an unreal world needs characters who make sense, particularly in a series that is as gooily devoted to exploring those characters’ inner lives as Maniac turns out to be. On this level, the show is half-baked and inconsistent.
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