Ever since her breakout role in the BBC American TV series ORPHAN BLACK, Tatiana Maslany has excelled at bringing neurosis to the forefront of narrative. She played multiple clones in the show and won a well-deserved Emmy for making them all so compelling, as well as for making them more than a little cra-cra. She brought a similar nervous energy to the frazzled attorney struggling with her new superpowers in the Disney+ show SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY AT LAW. And now, she’s playing a single mom trying to balance parenting, her demanding job, and being caught up in a murder mystery in the new AppleTV series MAXIMUM PLEASURE GUARANTEED. Once again, Maslany gives a performance that is truly out there, to say the least. Manic, sexy, pitiable, outrageous, and maybe even a little psycho, her Paula is one of the oddest and most unpredictable heroines to grace a show in many a moon. One part Nancy Drew, one part Carrie Bradshaw, and one part Lucy Ricardo, Maslany’s Paula keeps you laughing, gasping, and cheering her on through a zig-zagging mystery as cuckoo as she is.
In fact, the mystery might be a little too unwieldy, but at least it’s never predictable. Paula often acts recklessly in it, risking alienating the audience, and the story has some definitive discipline problems. Major characters disappear halfway through the narrative. The tone is pure Loony Tunes one minute, Lifetime movie pathos the next. And even the mystery often feels like it’s being made up as it goes along. Still, it’s never less than compelling, despite being a show that can be hard to wrap your head around.
Interestingly, both the show and Paula have boundary issues and balance challenges. She’s trying to raise her nine-year-old daughter, Hazel (Nola Wallace), as well as she can despite being in the midst of a nasty custody battle with her needling ex, Karl (Jake Johnson). The demands of her online magazine’s fact-checker job are intense. And throw in her online porn habit, where she spends most of her time with a cam boy named “Trevor” (Brandon Flynn), and you’ve got a character barely keeping her head above water.
She and her boy toy are almost cute together, trading sob stories about their harried existences instead of masturbating together for most of the hour, but then, during one session, Trevor appears to be kidnapped, and soon someone is calling Paula to shake her down for money. She’s smart enough to suspect a scam when she shares her story with Gen Z coworkers Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg) and Rudy (Charlie Hall), but not shrewd enough to stay away from getting involved with all of this new Trevor drama.
Soon enough, Paula becomes a suspect in his disappearance, and she has a number of aggressive characters after her, including a drolly cynical Detective Gonzales (a scene-stealing Dolly de Leon) and a mysterious fixer named Dennis, played by Murray Bartlett as a vicious yet amusing rogue. The rest of the series finds Paula trying to evade both, lying to all parties involved, and barely escaping death or bodily harm by the curls of her manic, frizzy hair. That hairdo, in fact, might be the best metaphor in a show all year long. It’s as out of control as Paula herself!
To tell more of the story would ruin the many twists and turns awaiting audiences who invest in David Rosen’s 10 episodes, a few of which dropped on the Apple streamer today. It never goes quite where you think it’s going to, and the more time you spend with Paula, the more time she will try your patience. (She’s almost that classic trope of an “unreliable narrator,” but then almost everything about her is quite unreliable.) Still, the surprises are many, as are the pleasures, including the increasing roles of the hilarious Geri and Rudy in the mystery, some surprising and grisly deaths that keep the story both tense and suspenseful, and the pathos that Maslany brings to the scenes where she’s trying to be a decent mom despite so many forces working against her.
AppleTV is on a roll this spring with its strong string of elevated dramedies like MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES, YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS, and now, MAXIMUM PLEASURE GUARANTEED. This newest one may not live up to its title entirely, but it never fails to amuse and intrigue. And in Maslany, the show has a talent who goes for broke and reaps the rewards of such a big, bold performance. Hell, that She-Hulk has nothing on the largess of Paula.
