Netflix’s new political thriller may well make you paranoid

The Madness
★★★★
Netflix

This eight-part thriller was written – by playwright and one-time Law & Order: Special Victims Unit writer Stephen Belber – before the recent US election, but it could not feel more politically topical. Colman Domingo (most recently seen as Rue’s sponsor Ali in Euphoria) is Muncie Daniels, a political pundit on CNN who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when he rents a cabin in the Poconos to start writing a book.

When his power cuts out, and he knocks on his neighbour’s door, he discovers a gruesome crime scene: a brutally dismembered body. Before he can think, he’s assailed by two men in balaclavas who chase him through the woods, ending in Muncie killing one of them with his nice fountain pen (he’s a writer, after all), and waking up the next day to discover he’s the prime suspect in the neighbour’s murder. The neighbour just so happens to be prominent alt-right leader Mark Simon, known to his millions of online followers as Brother 14. It’s the worst possible scenario for Muncie, a black man whose father was a well-known activist.

Still, he initially thinks he can explain everything to the police, head back to Philadelphia, and return to his normal life. But the cops find nothing at the scene of the murder – and then the assailant’s body is found, making Muncie a target for both the cops and the dead man’s enemies. Things unravel rapidly as he undertakes his own research into Brother 14, and it’s not great – not only was he a prominent member of neo-Nazi group The Forge, he has connections to very powerful people.

The action ramps up as Muncie’s plans are thwarted at every turn, and he realises there are few people he can trust outside his family – estranged wife Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake), son Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson) and daughter Kallie (Gabrielle Graham) from a previous relationship, and with whom he has a strained relationship.

CNN promptly dumps him, his manager/lawyer and close friend Kwesi (Deon Cole) is too afraid of the consequences to get involved, and because Muncie is a black man with links to an activist past, the police are of no help, as he realises how deep the conspiracy runs. On the run and (rightly) paranoid, Muncie has a sometime ally in FBI agent Franco (John Ortiz), but even the FBI seems constrained by secretive powers that be.

The Madness is a tense, Fugitive-style action-thriller (with perhaps a little too much emphasis on the action in the second half) that puts a timely twist on standard tropes – these shootouts and car chases are linked to the shift of far-right ideologies into the mainstream, the fight against disinformation and the role of the media in public discourse rather than mere bank heists.

Among the series’ digs at shadowy billionaires who claim they’re trying to save the planet (sound familiar?), social media and electoral manipulation, there’s also a central exploration of race, as Muncie, who struggles with escaping his father’s activist legacy, and trying to bring about change at his mainstream TV network, turns to the black community he has distanced himself from for help.