Last fall, the actress Emma Stone, wraith pale and peroxided, sat in a folding chair on a Silvercup Studios soundstage in Queens. She wore a tank top and a gray coveralls. Her face, fluorescent-lit, was set in perma-scowl.

“What’s normal, anyway?” she asked the camera throatily.

Good question.

Ms. Stone, in her first major television role, plays a damaged young woman named Annie in “Maniac,” a half-hour limited series, which begins streaming on Netflix on Sept. 21, and (really) likes to keep its viewers off-kilter. Just when you’ve found your balance the rug zooms out from under again. And wait: Where did those elves come from? This is a show with side effects.

“It was kind of important to us that there is no normal,” said the director Cary Fukunaga (“True Detective,” “Beasts of No Nation”), who developed the series with Patrick Somerville, a novelist and a writer and producer of “The Leftovers.”

“Maniac” is based, as loosely as a snapped balloon string, on a sweetly absurdist Norwegian series with the same name. The original “Maniac,” set in a mental hospital, centers on Espen, a schlubby inmate and likely schizophrenic who repurposes his bland surroundings for an active fantasy life in which he imagines himself as a cowboy, a war hero, a superspy.