Screenshot Emma Stone & Jonah Hill in Maniac: Season 1
The new Netflix series Maniac is set for release at 3 a.m. EST and midnight PST on Friday, September 21 (technically, the date is tonight). If that is too late for you to stay awake, you can watch it all at your convenience, just beware of spoilers.
Generally, Netflix shows become available around 3 a.m. ET on the show’s set release date. For most miniseries, this was also true. But, sometimes Netflix likes to throw a curveball when it comes to leaking episodes of a show or making them available before the original series release time. Take the popular House of Cards for example.
Netflix has released new seasons of House of Cards at different times and dates during its run. For the first couple seasons, it was released as scheduled, but when season 3 came out, Netflix decided to wait and release the episodes at 6 a.m. EST.
Maniac, loosely based on the Swedish series of the same name, has been one of Netflix’s most anticipated releases of the year. Cary Joji Fukanaga, who previously helmed the first season of HBO’s True Detective, directs all ten episodes.
In a recent interview with Variety, Fukunaga spoke about the difficulty of bringing his vision to fruition. He revealed that he and writing partner Patrick Somerville threw out nearly half of the original scripts and rewrote them from scratch.
“That was me. I was saying this wasn’t good enough,” he said. “We need to look at this again and tear it apart and go again. I realized I have a tendency to make things harder than they need to be.”
“Having fun with genre and not worrying too much about production value went out the door the moment I started conceiving of ideas,” he added. “Everyone was concerned. It made it hard to budget, it made it hard to schedule. But it was the right move.”
In addition to Fukunaga, Maniac boasts a stellar cast that includes Oscar winners Emma Stone and Sally Field and Oscar nominee Jonah Hill. In an interview with Elle Magazine, Stone spoke about why she chose the series as her first starring television role.
“The thing I liked about Maniac was that it’s about people who have their own internal struggles and are trying to fix them with a pill,” she said. “But you see over the course of the show that human connection and love is really the only thing that gets us through life. I liked that idea.” Stone and Hill previously starred in the 2007 teen comedy Superbad.
Early reviews for Maniac season one have been ecstatic, with many calling it one of the best shows on television. “The shifts in tone are also enjoyable, as Maniac goes from a dark sci-fi story to a compelling drama to a black comedy in just a few scenes,” writes Esquire. “Watching it you sense that feeling unsettled is exactly where Fukunaga wants you to be.”
Variety was similarly positive, writing: “The beautifully made Maniac plunges viewers into a fictional world that’s both divergent from our own and instantly recognizable — and then reinvents itself several times over, skittering across time, space and genre to tell a story of connection that feels urgent and deeply, painfully human.”