The stakes are high for Colman Domingo in the upcoming Netflix series, The Madness.
The Madness chronicles media pundit Muncie Daniels (Colman Domingo), who “may have lost his way in life,” according to an official synopsis.
“While on a work sabbatical in the Poconos to write the great American novel, Muncie finds himself the only witness to the murder of a well-known white supremacist, and now he’s being framed for the crime,” the description continues. “Muncie is forced to go on the run in a desperate fight to clear his name and unravel a global conspiracy before time runs out. Along the way he’ll reconnect with his family, find unlikely allies, and fight against disinformation in a post-truth age.”
In PEOPLE’s exclusive first look at a featurette about the show, Domingo, 54, explains the thriller series is about “a CNN analyst who gets wrongly accused of a crime.”
VJ Boyd, the series’ co-showrunner/executive producer adds that viewers will first see Muncie “at the height of his career.” He adds, “He’s a commentator, a pundit on CNN, he writes for Harper’s [Bazaar] and Atlantic, he teaches at UPenn.”
Executive producer and director Clement Virgo calls Muncie a “very suave, cool man who’s living his best life” who is “on top of the world” at the start of the story.
“He’s modeled after these pundits that are respected [and] at times, challenged even by their own communities, sometimes looked at as being not Black enough, and then to some folks too Black,” Domingo explains. “He was someone who was definitely an activist when he was younger, he moved into a different Echelon and then became a bit of a superstar, and he’s a little bit removed from the communities that he was advocating for and then he’s accused of murdering a white supremacist.”
The accusations lead him to go on “run to try to figure out what is happening,” Virgo adds.
While attempting to clear his name, Boyd shares that Muncie “discovers a conspiracy and realizes it’s much bigger than he ever thought.”
“He’s at a crossroads, and he’s trying to solve a crime, but at the same time he’s trying to solve something inside himself,” Stephen Belber, the series’ co-showrunner and creator, adds.
Virgo describes the show as “a kind of metaphor for the world that we’re in now, the social media world.”
Belber elaborates on how the show mirrors today’s culture, explaining, “You wake up every day and you read various headlines, and we’re in a sort of world where the notion of objectivity is really hard to come by as we navigate our way through all the information that’s coming at us 24/7.”
As for Muncie, Domingo believes his character wants to see the good in people despite the challenges of today’s world.
“Muncie actually believes to his core, if people sit at a table, that they can get things done, that they could talk to one another, I think he really does believe that,” he says. “The Madness is really examining the climate that we’re in right now and trying to tell us to think about that. Who sows those seeds of disinformation, who’s puppeteering all of this? That’s why Muncie is going through different sects of society to find out what’s going on.”
Belber concludes: “What’s important is the notion of how to declutter in order to find out what you care about amidst it all.”
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The Madness premieres Nov. 28 on Netflix.
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