Hey there, it's Tamara Keith from the NPR Politics Podcast, and I will keep this quick. Giving Tuesday is almost here. The perfect time to support the independent news source you rely on to stay informed. Please give today at donate. npr.org. And thank you. In the Netflix series The Madness, Coleman Domingo plays a CNN pundit who witnesses a brutal murder, then finds himself on the run as he's framed for the crime.
What follows is a paranoid thriller full of sinister forces, evil billionaires, underground militias, devious assassins, and lots of red herrings. I'm Aisha Harris. And I'm Stephen Thompson. Today we are talking about the madness on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. This is Eric Glass on This American Life.
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But don't worry, we're here to bring you some relief. Listen to the Life Kit podcast. We'll help you out this holiday season. It's just the two of us today. So in the first episode of The Madness, we meet Muncie Daniels. He's a Philly-based CNN pundit who's going through a divorce and at a crossroads in his career. He's played by Coleman Domingo. Muncie rents a house.
in the Poconos where he can decompress and work on his book, but he quickly finds himself the only witness to a grisly murder. It turns out the victim was a notorious white supremacist, and Muncie quickly realizes he's being framed, which means he's got a problem.
problem with not only the police and the FBI, but also white supremacists seeking vengeance. Over the course of eight episodes, we get a sense that there are even larger forces in play, and we also get to know Muncie's family and associates as well as some of the other players involved. Naturally, this being a paranoid thriller, not everyone is looking out for his best interests. The Madness is streaming now on Netflix. Aisha, what did you think of The Madness? I was mostly on board with this.
Colmen Domingo, I think he's great. He is playing a character that I think we've rarely seen in this kind of genre exercise. I love the fact that he's, you know, this... Black political pundit who used to be this on the ground activist and has since shifted into a more glamorous and less radical position as like a talking head. And, you know, now he's being thrust into these various webs of extremism and having. to like deal with that. And I also think it's interesting, like.
For this to come out at the time that it is, you don't really have to squint too hard to recognize some of the real-life analogs that were likely the inspiration for Muncie. Van Jones. There's a pun in this show involving Don Lemon. Yes, Don Lemon, the Black Lives Matter. Matter founders and supporters like Patrice Cullors, DeRay McKesson.
All of them have sort of faced the same kind of criticisms of like, once you seem to be for the people, starting, you know, organization, on the ground stuff. And now you're kind of like, maybe you're a little too much into your celebrity. Maybe you're enjoying, you know, hobby. knobbing with the a-list a little too much so i think it's really interesting to put that into this conspiracy thriller
framework and I admire the attempts to do it. I don't think it necessarily always successfully does so. Overall, I think it's fun. Well, fun is a weird word. I don't know if it's fun, but it's engaging enough. I think, to keep going. Like, at the end of each episode, I was, like, ready to press play again. So, yeah, I enjoyed it. I'm curious to hear how you felt about it, Stephen. Yeah, I felt the same way. I think that the key to the success of this show is that Coleman...
performance at the center of it. I had the experience last year of being kind of frustrated because I love Coleman Domingo as an actor, but I didn't love either of the movies that he was in, including the one that he was nominated for an Academy Award for. Rustin. Rustin. Yeah, he was also in The Color Purple. And I definitely had this thought of like, this guy is a towering actor whom I'd like to see get...
bigger and better roles. And this really gives him something to chew on. I saw a man get chopped up last night. And now I feel like I'm walking around with a bullseye on my back. There are tons and tons and tons of paranoid thriller elements to this show, and it leans into kind of all of them over the course of eight episodes. But at the heart, you have also a really interesting and...
nuanced, and expansive kind of character sketch of this guy. The evolution of his relationship with his estranged wife, with his son, with his... secret daughter. And by the way, I loved the performance by Gabrielle Graham as Callie, his daughter, who has this kind of laid back...
scene-it-all quality that I think really works well. I love this performance, and I love how rich and layered they allow the characterization to be. He is on a number of journeys at once. He's not simply trying to stay alive. He is not simply trying to unravel a conspiracy, clear his name. He's also working through these relationships with his family. And I think if you didn't have such a strong performance at the center, I might have gotten more hung up on some of this show.
flaws. It certainly has a lot of plot threads. We acknowledged in the intro a lot of red herrings, including some detours. that only questionably really even need to be there, where it feels like they're padding and stretching a little bit when they don't really need to. It's still...
It's an overstuffed story. And so some of that stuffing feels a little extraneous or doesn't necessarily ring true. There's kind of a subplot involving a kind of Antifa-type operation that I just didn't think worked at all. or made any particular sense. It was very weird. It was very weird. And then like it picks it up, but then it kind of drops it. Yeah. It comes and it goes. And then like by the end of it, I was like, oh, I forgot. There's an entire like militia that.
he spent like one or two scenes with and then they like kind of fade recede back into the background as like all these other bigger entities stay in the fold yeah and there are moments and characters where every once in a while they kind of then try to weave that thread back into the plot and you're like, oh yeah, that guy. Or, oh right. Or, oh, I missed that guy. You know, I thought the performance by John Ortiz as Franco, the FBI agent, is a really nice...
nice kind of shaded, interesting, multi-dimensional performance that I really loved in this show. Did you want him dead? You've been vocal in the past about the need to fight hate. Folks could look at that and say, hey, maybe Muncie Daniels decided to take this f***er out. Maybe the FBI did too, and they needed someone to blame. You watch too many movies.
There are tons of great character actors, including some we won't spoil, that are woven into this plot. But on balance for me, it's that central performance that really lets this hang together. Yeah, I did say, you know, I was ready. the end of each episode to press play. But I do think this could have benefited from being like a tight six episodes instead of occasionally meandering eight episodes. Because this is a show like...
As with all conspiracy theories, there are a lot of characters, a lot of names you have to remember because oftentimes they're not on screen. It's just people talking about those characters and you have to be like, wait, who? What? Who is this? And it leaves in eventually. It's not it goes beyond sort of the sort of neo-Nazi world. And then it brings in.
Like climate change comes up, like becomes a thread in it. Cobalt mining comes into play. Yeah. And again, I so admire the attempt to sort of try and... untangle and represent this weird age we currently live in where like people do not trust the media.
politicians like and this is very much a show that's like follow the money follow the money follow the money and like it leads to all of these different threads and in real life this is true you know of course there are Peter Thiel's in the world but it does get a little too match up its own
but I think to its detriment. Now I will say, yeah, the John Ortiz performance, I really, really love. I found that this show was able to, despite all of the headiness, occasionally dig into more, a little bit of levity. a scene where him and his soon-to-be ex-wife, who they both clearly still have feelings for, who's played by Marcia Stephanie Blake, and her name's Elena in the show. They go undercover to a swingers party. I'm like, okay, this is an interesting Hollywood.
version of the way swingers parties apparently work. Sure, why not? And that's where it gets a little bit fun. It felt a little bit like, oh, this is like a fun sort of spy thriller too. But I kind of wanted a little bit more fun. Throughout this show, he is constantly on the run. to evade various, you know, people trying to capture him. Yet he never...
goes under disguise. He always looks exactly like Coleman Domingo. Same facial hair. Yeah, he doesn't shave his beard. At one point, I'm like, why have you not shaved your beard? Not that that's going to make that much of a difference, but to a lot of white people.
You could be a completely different person when you shave your beard. All he does is like pull up the collar or he might put on a hat and like shade it. And I'm like, my dude, you are all over the news. Everyone is looking for you. There's a bounty on your head. And I wanted more like disguises, you know.
Sure. I mean, but that also gives the show the opportunity to have him kind of, he's in different levels of danger of being found out depending on where he is. When he is in the kind of Philly underground. Versus when he's kind of moving through the corridors of power, it's interesting the way he's able to, every once in a while, he's just recognized and it's like, oh, how can I help? When he encounters Black people, it's very different.
from what happens when he encounters white people. There's a great scene towards the end, in one of the later episodes, where he manages to evade a very dangerous situation yet again, and someone finds him and saves him. And this guy, he's very much giving living in a bunker type of vibes. Off the grid. Off the grid. Completely off the grid. He talks to him about like how he envisioned him, how he saw him in the public eye before all of this stuff went down. And then.
how he sees him afterwards. And he's like telling him, yo, I'm so happy you killed that white supremacist. This shows that you're like trying to get back to your roots. And this exchange happens. This is a turning point. And Muncie Daniels is the f***ing catalyst. Living up to your pop's legacy. I didn't kill Brother 14. I just got caught up with some f***ing. And now I'm just trying to protect my family.
It's worth noting that Muncie's father was a radical, that he was known for being a radical activist. And I just find that exchange very, it is a tale as old as time. especially when it comes to Black American characters in movies and TV shows where there's this pull between the revolution and, you know, walking on the other side of the revolution. Can those two things merge? And I appreciate it. that the show tries to sort of...
And the fact that like him being on the run is sort of like there are obvious sort of parallels to the Underground Railroad and those sorts of things and how he's able to, you know, find community in very unexpected places. like even like hang out and grill with one of the people who just like, he's like, oh, you're hiding out at your daughter's place. Like, hey, come out and have some barbecue. It's like, sure. Why not?
Yeah, and for me, those scenes worked a lot better than some of the kind of corridors of power stuff. Not to spoil anything, in the very last episode, there is a scene involving broadcast media. where there is something authorized to be said on broadcast media. That no broadcast media organization would ever allow in 100 trillion years because they would have been immediately hit with a...
10-figure lawsuit. I'm not always sure that this show has the surest handle on how broadcast media work. But at the same time...
As a paranoid thriller, you're always gonna... suspend a certain amount of disbelief you're always going to have a certain amount of like well that part is silly that would never happen how did he get out of that scrape etc you're always going to have some reservations but for me I think the strongest endorsement that I really had of this show is it's eight episodes it adds up to you know about six and a half hours or whatever and i'm more or less just next episode next episode next episode
Was I kind of seeing ghosts out of the corners of my eyes after a while, like living in this kind of paranoid universe in which every car that drives by may contain a menace? Absolutely. But that's the joy of a paranoid thriller. And I think... For all of its flaws, I think it coheres into something that has a magnificent performance at its center, a bunch of really terrific supporting performances revolving around it, ultimately found it immensely satisfying, even if I don't...
Yeah, I agree. To some extent, this show also kind of reminded me of Spike Lee's Black Klansman in a way. Absolutely. The white supremacist who is found dead at the beginning of the show, his wife plays a big part in... Muncy's sort of this whole conspiracy that he's unraveling. Or actually, I think it's his ex-wife. At least estranged. They were separated at the time, at minimum. Her name is Lucy, and she's played by Tamsin Topolsky. And she's...
left the whole Aryan Brotherhood or whatever he was a part of. Whatever you want to call it. Whatever you want to call it. The forge, they call it. The forge, yes. She's left that, but then she becomes a key part in trying to help him. Yeah, I think Tamsyn Topolsky does a really nice job with this role, and I think they're kind of...
She is often used as a little bit of a plot device in ways that I think that characterization could have been a little richer, even though I really liked the performance. Also, man... This show deploys character actors so beautifully. I can watch Stephen McKinley Henderson, who plays his friend Isaiah, is one of those faces, one of those guys.
Every time he pops up in something, I'm like, oh, it's that guy. I love that guy. He was the best part of Civil War. Anytime he pops up, it's great to see him. And I'd recommend it. Yeah, me too. All right. We want to know what you... you think about the madness, find us at facebook.com slash pchh. That brings us to the end of our show. Aisha Harris, thanks so much for being here. It was fun, Stephen. Thank you. This episode was produced by Hafsa Fatima and Liz Metzger and edited by Mike.
Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy, and Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all tomorrow. I'm Jesse Thorne. On Bullseye, Connie Chung, the legend of TV news, tells us about her incredible career and marvels at the convenience of standing desks. They have these desks. here in New York that move up and down. That's on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.
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