The age of the "are you paranoid enough?" thriller is here

On TV, the search for truth is perilous—and ever more pressing. Even Mr. Darcy can’t avoid it. This January alone has seen the return of hit conspiracy thrillers Severance and The Night Agent, and there are several more looming. But while mystery shows have long been part of TV’s bedrock, their preponderance of late seems less a programming note and more of a reflection of the broader culture. With disinformation surging and trust in elected officials abysmally low, it’s no wonder that characters intent on uncovering the truth have captured creators’—and viewers’—imaginations.

As veteran film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum noted in his 1999 essay “Paranoia Rising: Origins And Legacy Of The Conspiracy Thriller,” an uptick in big-screen conspiracy thrillers has often correlated with political scandals and the American public’s disillusionment. The Cold War threw paranoid cinema into overdrive, and Watergate inspired some of the greatest films in the genre: All The President’s Men, The Parallax View, and The Conversation. But Rosenbaum dates the genre back to at least 1915, when Louis Feuillade’s serial Les Vampires explored the dangers of high-tech surveillance and weapons. Interrogating the means of progress is nothing new, in pop culture or elsewhere. 

Belief is key to the paranoid thriller, which is why the figure at the center of these cinematic conspiracies—that is, tasked with getting to the bottom of them—was often an everyman, usually white, who was either directly involved in upholding government institutions or had no previous reason to question them. 1998’s Enemy Of The State put a new face on this disillusionment by dropping Will Smith into the middle of the intrigue (opposite Gene Hackman, a veteran of the genre). Jonathan Demme’s superb remake of The Manchurian Candidate went even further in reimagining the core players of the conspiracy thriller, pitting Denzel Washington’s dedicated soldier against Meryl Streep as the stage parent from hell. 

The TV conspiracy drama has followed roughly the same pattern, both in themes and casting, but 2024 marked one of the biggest developments in the small screen’s take on the genre. The people now tasked with testing the fortitude of these institutions are those who have historically benefited the least from them. Shows like True Detective: Night Country, La Máquina, and The Madness see Indigenous women, Latinos, and Black men in pursuit of the truth but with even more obstacles in their way than their predecessors. For these searchers, who have even less reason to accept any official explanations, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. Welcome to the “are you paranoid enough?” thriller.

2024 began with the fourth season of True Detective, wherein Issa López traded the male crime-solving duos of the past for Trooper Navarro (Kali Reis) and Chief Danvers (Jodie Foster) and centered the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The central mysteries were as tangled as that corpsicle, encompassing the Tsalal scientists and Native activist Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pederson). The horrific nature of the deaths provided much of the spectacle, but, like the Iñupiaq women who really powered the town of Ennis, López was more concerned with uncovering a less flashy but much more powerful culprit: the Silver Sky mining company, which had effectively been poisoning the town of Ennis for years and whose operations had been bolstered by the Tsalal scientists’ findings. The systemic violence against the people of Ennis, including Annie’s death, being overshadowed by the deaths of the associates of a major enterprise is a tale as old as time. So, as Bee (L’xeis Diane Benson) tells Danvers at the end of the season, the Iñupiaq women “told ourselves a different story with a different ending.” To do that, though, they had to dig deeper than the scientists, past the company’s manipulated reports and legalese, and the indifference of Alaskan officials.

Joe Murtagh’s The Woman In The Wall also unpacks real-life events. Unlike Silver Sky’s operations in Ennis, the wrongdoings of the Magdalene Laundries have already been widely publicized. Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson) is introduced looking like a madwoman or a banshee, stumbling down a country road dressed in a white nightgown with smears of blood on it. She’s one of many pregnant young women who were forced to work in the mother and baby homes before being made to give up their children. What begins as Lorna’s mission to find her daughter quickly becomes an indictment against the Magdalene Laundries as well as their subsequent whitewashing, which manifests in the show as a charitable group called Eadrom but had many more agents in real life. As Murtagh told The Wrap, the Eadrom leader represents “the bureaucratic state and the response that survivors seem to have gotten anytime they tried to look for justice—or look for just any basic human treatment, to be honest—from the state. It’s bureaucracy at its absolute worst, and that kind of cold, callous, unfeeling attitude towards survivors and adoptees.” Murtagh also follows the money generated by the women’s labor in the laundry and the children that were adopted out (for significant fees) to show how cruelty and commerce go hand in hand. But the revelations are brought about by Lorna’s determination and rejection of official explanations. 

La Máquina, Hulu’s first Spanish-language original, isn’t rooted in a specific chapter of Mexican history, but it taps into a feeling many people from marginalized communities will recognize: that the odds are stacked against them. Before diving into paranoia, La Máquina looks like a cross between sports dramas like Resurrection Boulevard and boxing films like On The Waterfront and The Harder They Fall. It combines the earnestness of the former (embodied here by Gael García Bernal as the eponymous boxer) with the shadiness of the latter, which is no unique experience for fans of boxing, a sport plagued by corruption. Soon, though, a shadowy organization rears its head, Esteban (García Bernal) is ordered to take a dive, his best friend/manager Andy (real-life BFF Diego Luna) admits that La Máquina’s storied career has been out of his hands this whole time, and Esteban’s ex-wife Irasema (Eiza González) stumbles upon the one corruption scandal that binds them all. 

Late in the limited series, someone from Esteban’s past tells him, “They write the story. All of it. Everything’s organized. Percentages. They are everything,” which jibes with the recordings Irasema finds in her journalist father’s home office—and the sentiments expressed in these thrillers that the conspiracy always runs deeper. Netflix’s The Madness wholeheartedly embraces that spirit, opening with a murder, moving into a cover-up, pointing fingers left and right, and then closing with a different murder and subsequent cover-up. The show, which stars Colman Domingo as activist-turned-pundit Muncie Daniels, is the clearest example of this new type of thriller, with a story that’s at once plausible and far-fetched. COINTELPRO still looms over Black activists and others deemed incendiaries, so it’s not so hard to believe that the U.S. government would continue its tradition of neutralizing Black leaders, or that the same news industry that once sought Muncie out would turn on him the moment he lost any of his palatability. What’s less believable is that the dapper Muncie, who sports a peacoat that would make Joseph Turner proud, would be able to move relatively undetected while conducting his investigation. Jokes aside, while the show spins out beyond creator Stephen Belber’s control, it does deliver some bracing tête-à-têtes, first between Muncie and FBI agent Franco Quinones (John Ortiz) and then between Muncie and the tech billionaire who ensnared him, almost by accident, in his plot. Despite the happy reunion in the show’s final moments, it’s clear that Muncie will be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.

What ties these shows together, in addition to conspiracies layered upon conspiracies, is the lingering sense of doubt, the feeling that the measure of closure or happiness they’ve found can be snatched away at any moment. Now, the lack of a tidy resolution is nothing new to conspiracy thrillers, but for the protagonists of shows like La Máquina, Night Country, and The Madness, it’s almost a foregone conclusion. Even when peace is this hard-won, it will remain under constant threat, either because of their gender or the color of their skin or a lack of resources. 

In the latest entry in this genre, Sterling K. Brown reunites with Dan Fogelman for Paradise, a political thriller in which the This Is Us star plays a chief of security who’s soon under suspicion for the death of the President Of The United States (played by James Marsden). We can also see elements of the “are you paranoid enough?” thriller in recent shows like Black Doves, in which government secrets are auctioned off to private entities by third parties with little concern for their potential to destabilize nations—or maybe that’s their selling point. But perhaps that actually marks a return to the era of what Rosenbaum dubbed the “Mabuse-like figure,” based on the “anarchistic villain” of Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler, who wreaks havoc on the economy almost on a whim. The In Dreams Begin Responsibilities author bemoaned the “reluctance of more recent thrillers to target the same sort of corporate entities that finance them” which “seem to limit some of the genre’s richer possibilities” before concluding with the prescient observation that, in “our present and triumphantly post-Communist period,” “anything and everything can be held responsible for the potential loss of our freedom except for the profit motive of large corporations.” In other words, the U.S. government could more readily serve as the villain of these conspiracy thrillers than some captain of industry. If that’s the case, then the answer to the question posed in these new conspiracy thrillers—”are you paranoid enough?”—is a resounding “no.”