Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Netflix’s latest thriller would have benefited from being half the length, and yet remains a moderately engaging rollercoaster thanks to the stellar performance of its movie-star lead.
Colman Domingo is that A-lister, and his magnetism is the glue holding together Stephen Belber’s The Madness, premiering Nov. 28,, whose enticing twists are undermined by a considerable amount of filler and much talk about race, disinformation, and injustice that turns out to be merely superficial embellishment for its central conspiracy. It’s easy to imagine the limited series working quite well as a feature film. At nearly eight hours, though, it’s another maddeningly bloated modern streaming venture.
The Madness is a classic “wrong man” affair about Muncie Daniels (Domingo), a broadcast journalist who’s on the cusp of finally nabbing his own CNN show. If his professional fortunes are looking up, however, his personal life is a mess. Muncie is estranged from his wife Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake), who wants him to finalize a divorce that he doesn’t desire, and his relationships with his teen son Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson) and older daughter Kallie (Gabrielle Graham) are shaky.
With multiple things on his mind, including recurring claims (made most recently by a TV guest) that he’s turned his back on his community for his own career, Muncie heads off by himself to a rented Poconos cabin, where he settles in to begin writing a book.
As suggested by a breakneck prologue, Muncie’s mountain getaway proves decidedly unpleasant. When his power goes out, he heads over to the neighboring residence, whose occupant Mark Simon (Tahmoh Penikett) had previously invited him to stop by if he needed anything. What Muncie finds in the property’s sauna is Mark’s dismembered body and two vicious masked gunmen intent on covering up their crime.
A chase through the woods culminates with Muncie successfully stabbing one of his assailants to death with a pen and then passing out in the woods, regardless of the fact that another would-be killer is still roaming the area. Muncie’s slumber is ostensibly a byproduct of his exhaustion and stress. Still, it’s rather preposterous, not only because it puts him in mortal peril, but because it allows his attacker to spend the rest of the day and night cleaning up his murderous mess and setting a plan in place to pin everything on the TV celebrity.
Muncie quickly deduces that he’s being framed for the murder of Mark, who was a leading neo-Nazi influencer known online by the handle Brother14. As a Black man with a history of activism—and a father who went to jail for murdering a racist landlord—Muncie makes for an ideal patsy.
Despite informing the cops about what really went down at the cabin, including the discovery that someone placed a tracker on his car, he immediately becomes the prime suspect in Simon’s disappearance and, once the victim’s body parts are located in Muncie’s apartment building, his murder. Thus, he’s forced to go on the run, even as he tries to cooperate with FBI agent Franco Quinones (John Ortiz), who thinks that Muncie’s dilemma is somehow related to his own investigation (the nature of which he won’t disclose), and who offers him scattered bits of assistance that don’t greatly improve his circumstances.
At once imposing and frazzled, confident and unnerved, Domingo is a commanding presence throughout The Madness, and he’s at his best when the material creatively boxes in Muncie, turning potential avenues of escape into dead ends. Yet to flesh out eight hour-long episodes, Belber saddles him with a variety of hang-ups—namely, a desire to selfishly go it alone, and to bolt when the going gets tough—that come across as unnecessary window dressing.
The same can be said about the proceedings’ interest in race. While Mark’s white nationalist ties, his wife Lucie’s (Tamsin Topolski) continuing relationship to that world, and constant verbal asides about Black persecution and corrupt cops all routinely foreground the issue, the show works hard to have it both ways. Moreover, it eventually becomes clear that Muncie’s predicament actually has nothing to do with intolerance, and everything to do with greed and power.
The Madness trades in hot-button topics without having the courage to say something bold about them. Fortunately, it’s adept at backing its protagonist into dangerous corners. The murder of a YouTube journalist who was collaborating with Mark suggests that the people after Muncie are playing for keeps, and his sleuthing soon points him in the direction of a billionaire (Bradley Whitford) and is aided, to varying degrees, by his lawyer friend Kwesi (Deon Cole) and surrogate father figure Isiah (Stephen McKinley Henderson).
In increasingly dire straits, Muncie takes drastic measures to protect himself and his loved ones, who inevitably become targets of the nefarious forces trying to silence him before he can ruin their operation—which, deflatingly, has to do with election interference, climate change, and a generic brand of corporate malevolence.
Belber’s story is ostensibly about corrosive disinformation and personal accountability, but those concerns feel like ornamentation. The Madness is most assured when it’s embracing its Hitchcockian roots and putting Muncie through the ringer, and Colman’s charismatic and nuanced performance helps it overcome a handful of developments that strain credulity.
Directors Clement Virgo, Jessica Lowrey, and Quyen Tran use deft framing to suggest the hero’s constricting situation, whether it’s the image of him spied through the bars of a fire escape, or compositions that visually squeeze and/or confine him to the screen’s edges. The series’ formal elegance amplifies its suspense. Consequently, it’s frustrating that it often makes Muncie’s saga literally as well as figuratively dark, casting everything in drab low light that offsets its otherwise impressive panache.
Although it spins its wheels with peripheral characters who never evolve beyond two-dimensional types, The Madness is paranoid and anxious enough to maintain intrigue through to its conclusion (if not, perhaps, its coda). Ultimately, it’s eerily similar to its many star-driven small-screen brethren—overlong and uneven if nonetheless reasonably captivating courtesy of its accomplished headliner.
