Colman Domingo's Netflix Thriller 'The Madness' Is Really Good! Until It Isn't

Is there a more instant and surefire way of hooking someone into a story than that story featuring a protagonist in a cool coat, hunched against the elements, harried by conspiratorial forces beyond their control? Not for me, there isn’t. The great American conspiracy thrillers of the ’70s—The Parallax View, Three Days Of the Condor, The Conversation, Klute, All the President’s Men—that’s the good stuff! Netflix’s new drama, The Madness, shares a lot of those key surface elements with the classics, but that’s where the comparisons stop. Despite a strong start that hooks you in and proves just about enough to power a full-season binge, that binge ends up leaving a disappointing taste in your mouth at the prospect of a strong premise, squandered.

In the waning days of 2024, with income inequality at an all-time high, trust in public institutions eroded, and billionaire-controlled social media molding reality in their interest, we are living in a time ready-made for conspiracy thrillers. Too ready, some might say, as millions of ordinary people appear to be living out their very own conspiracy stories — stories that so often align with the interests of the aforementioned billionaire owner class (funny how that works). This is the world that Colman Domingo’s Muncie Daniels finds himself in in The Madness. As an author and activist turned CNN pundit, his comfortable life is funded by fuelling the media circus that works overtime to rile people up and pit them against each other (spoiler alert: that is what the show’s title refers to, rather clumsily, in its closing moments).

The Madness opens with Daniels seeking to take a break from things. He’s good at his job, well off and famous as a result of it, yet he can feel it eating away at his soul. To try to re-center, he rents a remote cabin in the Pocono mountains, where he aims to work on his long-gestating book, away from the bustle of Baltimore. Arriving there, he is nearly instantly recognized by a man who turns out to be his woodland neighbor, from the cabin nearest to his. Despite the outward conviviality of the pair’s meeting, there’s an undercurrent of menace that immediately has ours and Muncie’s senses tingling. Who is this man, and is his staying at the cabin next to his purely coincidence? Why does he recognize him—is it only because he’s a TV pundit, or is there something else to it?

I won’t go into anymore detail here as so much of the joy there is to be had with shows like this is in the discovery of what exactly is going on, but suffice it to say that The Madness taps into a number of very legitimate, contemporary fears, including the rise of the alt-right, radicalisation, and targeted hate campaigns—and specifically how the internet fuels and enables these. For the first two or three episodes, the story draws you in powerfully. Colman Domingo can be a charismatic tour de force, and resting an entire show on his cool-coat-clad shoulders is a canny move. I could watch this man scowl and brood all day long. Thanks to some well-established directing and camera techniques, an effective and intriguing atmosphere of paranoia is generated from the outset. The rhythms of escalation, discovery, and retaliation that the genre dictates must follow are, unfortunately, handled less adeptly.

The drama falters more and more as the show goes on, and too many things are left woefully underdeveloped, chief of which (and least forgivably) being the main character himself. There are hints and feints at a compelling past and intriguing family dynamics—a neglected daughter, a father who may or may not have taken direct action a bit too far—but none are explored enough to satisfy. The Madness is also full of characters behaving irrationally, or just plain stupidly. One of my pet peeves is people judging fictional characters too harshly—people in real life don’t behave completely rationally or perfectly logically under pressure, so I don’t know why we expect fictional ones to do so—but there is always a line, and the show crosses it too many times. The show’s politics, too, prove muddy and confused. Without going into detail, it tries to have its cake and eat it, almost tipping into nonsensical bothsiderism while making some truly bizarre choices, and it undermines its own premise in the process. Is it worth a watch? Sure. Are you going to want your time back afterwards? Maybe.