Crazy People

Crazy People is a quirky and offbeat comedy that tells the story of Benjamin Chase, a senior ad executive at a large advertising firm. Benjamin is a ruthless and cunning businessman who has reached the pinnacle of success in his profession. However, beneath his polished exterior, Benjamin is struggling to find meaning and purpose in his life. He is lonely, disconnected from his family, and feels empty inside. Benjamin's life takes a drastic turn when he is involved in a fender bender while driving home from the office. In a fit of rage, he throws a punch at a police officer who pulls him over, and as a result, he is arrested and taken to a mental institution for psychiatric evaluation. After a series of frustrating interactions with the psychiatrists, who refuse to believe that he is anything but a poster child for paranoid schizophrenia, Benjamin is labeled as a "schizophrenic" and is asked to spend some time in the institution's psych ward to "sort out his problems." Benjamin is amazed by the fact that he has been deemed crazy and writes a letter to the CEO of his ad agency to let him know about his new living arrangements. He is amused by the fact that his colleagues and clients think he's crazy and can't even access the corporate building. Benjamin decides to make the most of his time in the institution and convinces himself that being in a mental hospital is a perfect opportunity to recharge and "refined" himself. While at the institution, Benjamin discovers a group of patients who would become his unlikely friends. Among them are Brian, a genius physicist who's confined due to insanity; Ginny, a former heiress struggling with identity crises; and Leo, a well-educated genius who's been in the institution longer than most other patients have been alive. The group is known as the "Advertising and Creative Solutions Brigade," a group of talented, yet unafraid, free thinkers who challenge the notion of the healthcare system's restrictions on creative thought. The group recognizes Benjamin's knowledge of advertising and suggests that he become the head of "A.C.S.B." within the institution. With the help of his new friends, Benjamin starts making more profit than he can at his former job, thanks to the advertising campaigns he creates in his mind within the confines of the institutions walls and even networks outside by mail. The group of former loonies, using their knowledge in areas like physics, business, and art, form a dynamic and highly skilled team, each bringing their unique perspective and skill to create revolutionary advertising ideas. They manage to capture the attention of their peers within the advertising industry, even as Benjamin's institutional handlers struggle to manage the newly thriving team. Benjamin becomes known as the "Macho and Mach 1 Man of Advertising," while also being the most promising psychiatric patient in the media. With a charismatic salesman's voice and a keen instinct for seeing beneath the surface of customers' buying desires, Benjamin uses his talent for understanding human nature to realize the company's profits have quadrupled. Under pressure from corporate to remove and replace him from his job "as a 'treasonable employee in bad health' who turned out better selling ads from an institution; the former high-powered ad-executive visits his old agency but everyone believes he is just crazy and the patients he is meeting there insist that’s possible too. As Benjamin delves deeper into the heart of the mental institution and forms new relationships, he starts to question the notions of his former life. Has he truly gone mad, or has the societal façade and pressures of corporate life reduced him to a hollow shell of his former self. Torn between his desire to return to his old life and the connections he's made with his "crazy" friends, Benjamin must decide whether to conform to societal norms or break free from the constraints of the conventional world.