Let’s be honest. A show like “Maniac” was never going play it safe in any department.
When it comes to music, the show had free reign of genre and time period to help tell its reality-spanning epic. Aside from Dan Romer’s versatile (and at some turns, haunting) score, there’s still an impressive array of songs to help tell the story.
Like with a few other Netflix shows so far this year, some of these songs managed to play big parts within the story itself. (How else would we have been able to hear Billy Magnussen show off his singing chops without some help from Gordon Sumner and friends?)
Each of these new worlds uses so many different elements to signal how much has changed — or stayed the same. Case in point: that wacky ’80s fur store saga, which managed to rope in Hall & Oates, Art of Noise, and Herb Alpert for good measure.
One person helping to corral all of these ideas is music supervisor Susan Jacobs (who we spoke to last month after her work on the HBO series “Sharp Objects”). From Geto Boys to an Icelandic twist on “When the Saints Go Marching In,” this is one particularly wild ride.
To help facilitate that journey (and to help you relive the magic once your ten-episode journey is over), check out our “Maniac” playlist below:
Not all the songs from the show are available on Spotify. (If you’re curious about that one triumphant moment in a diner kitchen, that song is here.) Anything big that we didn’t catch? Let us know.
“Maniac” is now available to stream on Netflix.
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