I had talked about this before and mentioned that I was waiting for more "intel" before i gave my full opine. I now have all the info and it is unfortunate that I have to report, despite liking most of the acting, that the story is weak, unfulfilling, and just not good.

So I am going to be as spoiler-free as possible. Owen and Annie are both signing up for experimental drug treatment for very different reasons and they end up knowing one another in the trials and seem to be drawn to each other. Inside of their "dream trials" (which you will understand if you watch just a little bit of this - which i can't really recommend that you do) they always end up finding one another and helping.

Mostly the acting is good but at times (especially the time that is meant to be the early 1940's) the acting, particularly by Jonah Hill - and actor I adore - is quite bad and the fake accents are even worse.

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This story is convoluted and difficult to follow for the most part. I was happy that Sally Field was in the project but beause her character is the mother of another character that isn't really brought to the front-lines until most viewers had given up, her always stellar performance probably went largely unnoticed.

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Sally is meant to be the driving force behind so much in this series as she is actually the whole reason (accidentally) why everything in this movie goes wrong. I can't expound on this more without giving massive spoilers! Let me get to the point.

I don't really care for the way that Jonah Hill acted in this series: I think he is a fantastic actor but this series might have actually revealed his limitation in my mind. His performance is a DIRECT copy of Rami Malek from "Mr. Robot" and the only difference is that Rami did it well and Jonah actually appeared to be a robot in this series... a boring one at that.

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As one gets further and further into the episodes it just gets much stranger and none of it actually makes any sense as far as the original storyline was trying to portray. I mean, i don't even understand who was helped by the entire thing. Sally Field I guess.

I applaud Jonah losing so much weight for this project, but his performance is very poor. Emma Stone did fine and is probably the savior of this entire thing because it becomes very weird, very fast.... and this is fine if it makes sense in the end but at the end of this series the viewer is left with a big "huh?" about pretty much all of what just went on.... and then we are presented with an ending so completely implausible it seems as though they made it up on the spot without any consideration paid to whether or not it is possible.

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The real star of this flop (in my opine) is Dr. Azumi Fujita (a relatively unknown actress named Sonoya Mizuno) who smokes almost through the entirety of the series. I have worked on films and I also smoke. But the amount of ciggies she must have went through in order to get through this film must have been unbelievable.

As much as a tried to, i cannot recommend this series because it just isn't good. The trailers make it look like it is good, but it simply isn't.

On a scale of "urgh!" to "Wowsers" I give Maniac a rating of ...

"Skipsies!"