Review: 'The Madness' Holds a Warped Mirror Up to a Mad, Mad World

Out actor Colman Domingo has played straight before in movies like "The Color Purple," but in the new Netflix limited series "The Madness," his hero, Muncie Daniels, is a straight man in more ways than one, caught up in an almost absurdly off-kilter world of lunatic conspiracies and conspiracy theory-level credulity.

Daniels is a pundit on the rise: An commentator and occasional guest anchor on CNN in line to get his own show, Daniels is just starting to pen what's sure to be a bestselling book. Seeking some refuge from the distractions of city life, he rents a house in the Poconos and barely has time to meet his new neighbor, Mark (Tahmoh Penikett) when that friendly-seeming man turns up dead and dismembered.

A witness to the crime, Daniels is pursued through a swamp, a pair of masked assassins in pursuit. An action hero is born – though one prone to all the mistakes of the genre. Soon enough, he's the one the police are looking at as the number one suspect in the slaying. Things are even worse than being a murder suspect, given that Mark was a white supremacist influencer who went under the moniker Brother 14. It's not long before the crazies start coming out of the woodwork, all gunning for Muncie... some of them literally, others with their cell phones held at the ready to capture him in a moment of engineered rage.

The world around him is caving in, but Muncie's personal life is already a mess. Highly focused on career, he's neglected family, which is why his estranged wife, Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake), is leaving him, and his son, Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson), is a virtual stranger. Closer to him is his eldest child, Kallie (Gabrielle Graham), a daughter born out of wedlock; she's tough and street-smart, more so by far than her dad. Elena, too, is sharp and strong, and he has the friendship of people in both high and low places, including a lawyer at a prestigious firm (Deon Cole) and a cigar shop owner (Stephen McKinley Henderson) with shady connections. An uneasy alliance with Mark's widow, Lucie (Tamsin Topolski), completes the array of complex characters.

Without their help, Muncie would be easy prey for the forces closing in on him as planted evidence begins to accumulate and a lethally effective corporate killer draws ever nearer to eradicating him – at which point Muncie will simply become another statistic, the sinister machinations he's uncovered will continue, and the public will move on.

But Muncie is clever enough to lay plans of his own, and he slowly starts to piece the puzzle together, realizing only gradually just how high up the power hierarchy the conspiracies go, and just how cynical – and ruthless – his enemies really are.

The series takes some aggravatingly cliche turns, as when Muncie, owner of a new gun, chases off some punks by firing several rounds into the air; this makes him seem more a suspect in the eyes of the law, and video of the moment doesn't help him in the court of public opinion. At other moments, local cops seem so dull-witted and lazy as be nothing more than straw men for equally lazy plotting, and a story thread involving an FBI agent becomes unnecessarily dramatic.

But the genre staple of a flawed man bolstered by family – and by strong women who have every reason not to believe in him, but somehow keep faith – serves this series well.

"The Madness" is supposed to be a metaphor for the world of constant information, propaganda, and big-money-driven lies that we live in. On a deeper level it's a morality play with ancient contours that warn us against megalomania and conceit, and remind us that there are values more precious than success, fame, or money – namely, family and friendship.

Perhaps some day those values will be embodied by a hero's renewed commitment to a same-sex spouse and the support of a queer group of committed friends, and the out actor will have a chance to return to Action Hero mode while playing gay as brilliantly as he did in last year's Netflix movie, "Rustin."

"The Madness" streams on Netflix beginning Nov. 28.