Netflix’s The Madness Casts Colman Domingo in a ’70s-Style Paranoid Thriller for Our Time
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.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]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, Muncie discovers he’s being framed for a local white supremacist’s murder, which he happens to have been the only person to witness.
A pundit who traded strong convictions for a mainstream platform and his family’s stability for personal success, Muncie suddenly becomes a fugitive shouldering the weight of everything he worked to transcend, from systemic racism to the sins of his father, while facing dark forces far wealthier and more powerful than a few neo-Nazis. Once a ringmaster of the media circus, he’s now the caged lion. And he has to discern which of the few allies who believe he’s innocent—a fringe media personality (Bri Neal), the victim’s estranged widow (Tamsin Topolski), an FBI agent with an agenda of his own (John Ortiz)—he can actually trust. It’s at once a terrifying situation and a chance to finally develop an appreciation for friends and family whose loyalty he hasn’t reciprocated. Conveyed by Domingo with subtlety and intelligence, this level of detail makes Muncie the rare richly drawn hero in a genre that tends to privilege plot over character.
Less convincing, at times, are the details of the world-gone-mad he inhabits. Sometimes, in its quest to frame both ends of the political spectrum as unhinged, the show verges on cartoonish. Is it not enough to have Muncie visit an antifa “gun commune”—does the guy he’s looking for there have to frequent swinger bars, too? Yet The Madness resonates anyway, thanks largely to its atmosphere of all-encompassing panic, fueled by anxiety that Muncie is a pawn of nefarious individuals with the power to bend society to their will and underscored by inventive action sequences. Now that so many political thrillers, from Citadel to Hijack, go out of their way to avoid political faultlines for fear of offending viewers at home or abroad, it’s a relief to have a show that at least acknowledges how very frantic the vibes have become.