Unless your hero straight-up dies, it seems that in this day and age that anything planned as a miniseries has the potential to break out of that limited format and into something larger. We’ve seen this happen with series from Big Little Lies to Shogun to The White Lotus, and we can add another possibility to the list, The Madness.
The Madness is Netflix’s new thriller series starring Colman Domingo, a Best Actor nominee at the Oscars. Domingo has had turns on Fear the Walking Dead (arguably the best aspect of that show) and Euphoria, but now he’s leading his own production here.
The show debuted at #2 on Netflix and has now unseated the widely-watched JonBenet Ramsey documentary to take the #1 spot. That is an exceptional performance, and it’s currently #1 in 41 different countries, showing it has global reach.
The Madness also is not based on any particular source material, it was created specifically for Netflix by Stephen Belber, which means they have not run out of novels to adapt like say, Shogun, who is pushing past that problem with two new seasons. Rather, they could invent a new storyline for Muncie Daniels who (spoilers) survives the events of the show. And at the very least, star Colman Domingo is on board (via Deadline)
“Listen, I don’t really say this a lot about any show because I like going from moment to moment and having great moments in a show and moving on with my life and doing something else. This show, I think there’s more from Muncie. I would really love to engage with a Season 2, so we’ll see if people think he’s got more story in him as well, so I hope people watch.”
Well, people are watching, so that’s a good start. Thriller/grounded crime stories are not exactly huge budget productions, and despite Domingo’s Oscar nomination chances are he’s not demanding crazy A-list money to star.
The third pillar here is how the show is received, not just viewed and that is…somewhat mixed. It’s got a decently solid 69% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, good but not amazing in context. Audience reviews are lower, a 55% right now with a slightly better 6.5/10 on IMDB. That said, Netflix cares way, way more about viewership versus cost than anything else, which would be the deciding factor here, along with tracking how many people stick around the finish the entire mystery.
Given that no season 2 was initially planned, if The Madness is indeed picked up again, it may have a longer production process if a new story has to be invented from scratch without pre-writing or some other book to reference. We’ll find out more soon.
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