The Madness is the Hitchcockian Tech Noir We Need Right Now
Colman Domingo takes us on a wild ride in Netflix’s new thriller.
Muncie Daniels (Colman Domingo) has mastered the art of being in the right place at the right time. A part-time contributor for CNN with a passion for social justice, Muncie prioritizes his professional reputation above all. It’s kind of the only thing he has going for him at the moment anyway — though he strives to look as polished as possible on paper, his personal life is strained at best. He’s on the outs with his wife Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake), leaving their son Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson) to navigate the trials of adolescence on his own.
But Muncie is also running from a past life: his younger days in North Philadelphia taught him all he knows about grassroots movements, but they harmed as much as they helped. He doesn’t talk much about his father, who served a life sentence in prison after a fatal altercation for fair housing, and he all but ignores the members of his family he left behind. When we first meet him in The Madness, a brittle tech noir created by Clement Virgo, he’s determined to move forward. It’s why Muncie is writing a novel in his downtime, renting a plush cabin in the Poconos to stoke his creativity anew.
What begins as a peaceful weekend away quickly spirals into the stuff of nightmares. When Muncie stumbles across a chopped-up body in the cabin next door — which turns out to be Mark Simon (Tahmoh Penikett), a notorious white supremacist with a wildly popular QAnon newsletter — Mr. “Right Place, Right Time” finds his life turned completely upside down.
In no time at all, Muncie becomes a prime suspect in the murder of a cult leader. The FBI conflate his ties to the Black Lives Matter movement with murderous intent, while Simon’s followers only sink his reputation further. Not only do they circulate misinformation through the white supremacist forum known as the Forge, they also use their sprawling network to keep tabs on Muncie and his family. Their personal information is doxxed online, and they can’t seem to hide anywhere without running into a new tormentor. With few places left to turn, Muncie’s forced to seek help from the community he abandoned in North Philly: his estranged eldest daughter Kallie (Gabrielle Graham), and Isiah (a steely Stephen McKinley Henderson), the civil rights activist who practically raised him.
As Muncie strives to clear his name, he inevitably stumbles into a city-wide conspiracy, allowing The Madness to explore a litany of timely themes. The rise of conservatism across the country has become all the more relevant of late, and there’s likely no better time for such a series to premiere. The Madness tackles issues of blind bigotry and the rot of social media with a sure, steady hand, reveling in the paranoia of Muncie’s plight without losing sight of its central message. While Virgo and his collaborators aren’t afraid to depict radical conservatism in its many forms, they also make sure to explore the other side of that coin — that of radical libertarianism — with nuance and intention.
The Madness is not your typical Hitchcockian remix, if only because it shares some connective tissue with tight-wound, Black-led stories like Get Out and Judas and the Black Messiah. As Muncie wades deeper into this new world, the series embraces more psychological tension, inviting you to wonder how much of this is real — and if it is, how much of it Muncie can take before he snaps. Wherever the series gets its namesake, it’s determined to keep us on the edge of our seats. On that front, and on so many others, it doesn’t disappoint, injecting a classic premise with a much-needed new perspective.
