Maniac: second season is now a possibility

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Despite previous reports that Netflix’s latest drama, Maniac, wouldn’t be returning for a second season, co-creator Cary Joji Fukunaga has teased the possibility of the show continuing without his involvement…

Talking to Business Insider, he said, “For me, I like to do one and move onto something else. I’d be very happy if another season were to happen, but I think they were just thinking about this as a limited season and if there’s an appetite for another one then I think Patrick [Somerville, co-creator of Maniac] would be happy to take it up and do it again. But not with me.”

That definitely sounds like Fukunaga giving the green light for future seasons but Maniac might struggle to retain its stars. Emma Stone, who stars in the series alongside Jonah Hill, previously said, “I loved the idea of working with Cary. I was a fan of his work, and the concept I thought sounded really fascinating.”

“But again, it was a log line. It was a sentence. So once Patrick came on board and really developed it in the way that he did, it was a bunch of moving parts that came together.”

We’ll keep you updated on Maniac.

Digital Spy

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Newly-minted Bond director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s new Netflix series, Maniac, featuring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, won’t be returning for a second series – although it’s for solely creative reasons…

The series, which premiered on Friday to broadly positive reviews, sees Stone and Hill as a pair of strangers who take part in a mysterious drug trial where they’re promised a solution to all their problems. As you’d imagine, things don’t go quite so smoothly.

Fukunaga and co-creator Patrick Somerville have now insisted that we won’t be seeing a second season of Maniac despite the warm reception. Somerville was asked by The Hollywood Reporter if there was a conversation about another outing for the show (polite warning that his answer offers the lightest of spoilers for the first season).

Somerville said, “No. This was always planned as a limited series, and I think that’s another reason why we had the freedom to have a more hopeful ending.”

“A lot of times on TV, you have to throw your characters into distress again near the end to buy the next season, and we don’t have to do that. It is a tremendous amount of energy and imagination to just to make a new show, and so you do have this feeling of wanting to hold on and keep using it, because there’s so much imagination in there, but I think part of why Maniac had that improvisational feeling along the way was knowing that this is it. Let’s do it now, because this is what Maniac is.”

Maniac is currently streaming on Netflix.

The Hollywood Reporter