Muncie Daniels is just trying to make his voice heard over the cacophony that passes for public discourse. An ambitious CNN commentator, the protagonist of the action-packed Netflix conspiracy thriller The Madness has been neglecting his disordered personal life and losing sight of his progressive values. But all that bland, commercially palatable careerism can’t prevent Muncie, played by the versatile Emmy winner Colman Domingo, from getting dragged into a war between the far right and the radical left, edgelord billionaires and misfits living communally at society’s fringes. In fact, that war threatens to annihilate everything he’s achieved.
It’s a timely premise, following a presidential election that empowered one extreme, alienated the other, and left the U.S. with an even noisier, more chaotic public square than we had before. Creator Stephen Belber (Tommy) and his co-showrunner, VJ Boyd (Justified), channel our collective exhaustion with the discourse into a ‘70s-style paranoid thriller grounded in the hyperpartisan polarization of today. The Madness can traffic in false equivalences—a common pitfall of political fiction that values moderation as an end in itself. And the show sometimes gets goofy in depicting the personalities and peccadilloes of each faction. Still, it mostly succeeds, on the strength of Domingo’s performance, Muncie’s complexity, and, above all, the visceral sense of contemporary chaos and futility it channels.
Muncie is hoping to get away from it all when he rents a cabin in the Poconos to work on his novel. What he’s escaping includes an ex (Marsha Stephanie Blake) he still loves, the couple’s resentful teenage son (Thaddeus J.Mixson), an adult daughter (Gabrielle Graham) he has neglected, a colleague who all but calls him a sellout on national TV, and, deeper in his consciousness, unresolved angst surrounding his father, who let otherwise laudable ideals lead him into violence. Instead of penning a best seller,…
