Named earlier this year as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, the versatile Colman Domingo has gained awards attention for playing a civil rights activist (Rustin), recovering drug addict (Euphoria), and unscrupulous pimp (Zola). Thanks to a remarkably visceral cat-and-mouse chase in new Netflix original The Madness, that list should now extend to reluctant action hero whose ability to improvise deadly weapons could rival Jason Bourne.
Domingo stars in Stephen Belber’s eight-part series as Muncie Daniels, a socially conscious CNN pundit whose previous advocacy for the Black community has taken a backseat to both his media profile and long-held ambitions to write the Great American novel: the shot of an old engraved gift from estranged wife Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake) shows he’s missed his self-imposed deadline for the latter by at least a decade.
A writing retreat in the Pocono Mountains fails to provide much further inspiration, and yet ironically his own life soon begins to resemble a page-turning conspiracy thriller. Indeed, following a power outage at his isolated wood cabin, Daniels heads to seemingly mild-mannered neighbor Bobby (Steve Byers) to borrow some propane, the two strangers having just exchanged some brief pleasantries and some minor passive-aggression (“You look familiar. Oh man, you got opinions”), the reasons for which will soon become apparent.
Sadly, for poor old Bobby, the next time Daniels lays eyes on him, his head will be detached from his decapitated, blood-soaked limbs in a small woodland sauna. “F--- me,” comes the understandably shell-shocked response on seeing what’s essentially a human jigsaw puzzle. And unfortunately for Daniels, having been alerted to his presence, the two masked men responsible for all the carnage now seem determined to subject him to the same grisly fate.
Of course, we already know by this point that Daniels makes it out alive. The cold open’s flashforward shows him waking up in the forest, staggering to the nearest highway, and, after failing to hitchhike, eventually stumbling across two cops in a truck stop diner. Yet that doesn’t make his precarious escape any less intense.
Daniels certainly doesn’t get away easily, slipping and sliding around the autumnal landscape before accidentally wading into a pool of water, all the while whimpering and gasping for air. Daniels is fast, for sure, and as we soon find out, impressively resourceful. However, he’s far more everyman than superhuman, and Domingo brilliantly exhibits the fear and panic of someone who knows that every breath may be his last.
The sound design here is also immaculate, not just from the persistent rumbling drums that accompany Daniels’ run for survival, but also from the cawing birds and rustling bushes which helps bring viewers into the heart of the Poconos. It also knows when to stay quiet, though, as in the terrifying scene when one of the balaclava-clad assassins shoots wildly into the waters Daniels has immersed himself in. As his head slowly emerges to evaluate the threat, Domingo evokes Martin Sheen’s Vietnam War vet in Apocalypse Now (minus the face caked in mud).
Daniels nullifies half this threat when he catches one assailant off guard, drags him into the waters and engages in a clumsy battle to the death, eventually skewering him with the tool meant to craft his intended literary masterpiece. The pen really is mightier than the sword as it happens.
“As a writer, you must have a pretty active imagination,” argues one of the two cops who grow increasingly skeptical of Daniels’ story, particularly when they head to the scene of the crime. “We’re not going to end up arresting you for this are we?” they ask after finding the sauna suspiciously free of any severed appendages, exemplifying the show’s central themes of objectivity, cynicism, and reliability in the post-truth age.
The Madness continues to explore the increasingly blurred lines between fact and fiction as the plot thickens. Daniels discovers Bobby wasn’t an upstanding member of society after all, but a member of a white supremacist movement named The Forge. “He’s a cancerous f---ing tumor on the brain stem of the country,” he tells FBI operative Franco (John Ortiz), who along with personal agent Kwesi (Deon Cole) and weed-obsessed son Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson), is one of the few who appears to believe the pundit’s version of events.
Admittedly, Daniels’ near-death ordeal does sound incredulous. There’s a damning lack of chopped-up bodies, for one thing, or indeed much physical evidence at all. However, with our pulses still racing from possibly the most high-octane, edge-of-your-seat TV sequence of 2024, we, the audience, unequivocally know which way the madness really lies.
