Old love ’em and leave ’em Fukunaga is at it again, apparently, with Variety reporting that newly minted James Bond director Cary Fukunaga has made it clear that he has no interest in returning for a hypothetical second season of Netflix’s new show Maniac. Fukunaga helmed all eight episodes of the just-released series, much as he did with the celebrated first season of HBO’s True Detective. And just like in that previous case, he’s now said his work on the show was strictly a one-and-done affair.
“For me, I like to do one and move onto something else,” Fukunaga said in a recent interview about his work on the surreal, slowly-building series. Of course, he also made it clear that no one’s actually asking him to direct more Maniac at the moment, either, noting that, “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 [show creator] Patrick [Somerville] would be happy to take it up and do it again.” “But,” he made abundantly clear, “Not with me.”
Maniac is generating strong critical buzz at the moment, at least partly on the strength of Fukunaga’s disorienting and dream-like direction. And while the series definitely reaches some kind of natural end-point in its current run—and has been consistently billed as a single-run miniseries, anyway—that doesn’t necessarily mean much in 2018, when every hit “limited series” is typically only as limited as the people producing it think they can get away with.