Netflix Madness

With a few spoilers

“Madness” is a new limited series on Netflix that bugs the hell out of me. I’ve come to lack the patience for series (what’s the plural of ‘series’?) that start out without much of a premise and stretch it out interminably, like those innumerable Brit police-detective shows. (I make an exception for “Shetland,” though I miss the Jimmie Perez character.) The limited series, with maybe just eight episodes that have a more-or-less definitive ending, are easier to take.

This one stars Colman Domingo, an actor I like. The acting is good but the story is wack. It portrays “Antifa” as an organized terrorist group that is deeply insane and heavily armed. The actual Antifa is nothing like that and never has been. For one thing, it is not organized so much as small, loose groupings of youths in a few places. For another, it — though there is hardly an “it” — has never been shown to have done more than break some windows or maybe — rarely — set a fire. (The most famous case of the latter in Minneapolis is thought to have been committed by a police provocateur.) The one case of someone who was armed and had a leftist coloration was ruthless hunted down and killed by Federal agents during the first Trump administration.

Behind the mayhem in “Madness” (the title doesn’t make much sense) is a murderous billionaire conspiracy led by an Elon Musk-like character motivated by climate change to promote renewable energy. His evil doers think they are saving the world. Again, not happening. Any such conspiracies are mounted on behalf of fossil fuel.

Then there is the wholly improbable multiracial, Antifa-like “gun commune” where transgender and non-white people are welcome. Underlying all this nonsense is the desire to shift the onus of neo-fascist terrorism from Right to Left: to gay hippies.

I was thinking that my favorite MAGA television writer Taylor Sheridan was behind this treacle, but apparently not. Notwithstanding the plot absurdities, the series is still absorbing. It’s kind of a redo of “The Fugitive,” but with black and Puerto Rican folks. In that regard, for someone wanted by the various law enforcement agencies, the Domingo seems to get around a lot without being gunned down by the Philadelphia Police Department, that well-known paragon of righteous “protect and serve” practice.