Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Knows Exactly What To Do With Tatiana Maslany
The Orphan Black alum sinks her teeth into this thrumming cyber thriller.
It is legitimately impossible — borderline quixotic — not to think about Orphan Black any time Tatiana Maslany stars in a TV show. The Canadian actress delivered a masterclass in the seminal BBC series, portraying dozens of near-identical, emotionally distinct clones in a way that looked totally easy. That juggernaut of a performance can’t be replicated, dedicated as Maslany is to elevating every role she books. So it’s not exactly fair to tune into, say, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and expect a similar level of finesse. Lightning can’t strike twice!
That said, we do get pretty damn close to that greatness with Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. The Apple TV crime thriller shares a lot with Orphan Black, if only because — unlike most of what’s come in the intervening years — it knows exactly what to do with Maslany. It also doesn’t hurt that, give or take a few details, the series follows the same beats as the story that defined her career. Maslany is once again a troubled single mom who witnesses a brutal murder and stumbles into a vortex of conspiracy and exploitation. This time, though, the demise she’s caught up in is not of her clone, but of a cam-boy who’s been scamming her for months.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed gets one thing very right by casting Maslany as Paula, an everywoman harboring so many secrets she might as well be playing multiple identical characters. Freshly divorced, fighting for custody of her daughter, and groveling for a raise at work, Paula has a lot to compartmentalize. Her ex, Karl, might be Jake Johnson at his most evil: not only did he leave Paula for his more polished coworker, Mallory (Jessy Hodges), but he’s now doing everything in his power to wrest custody of Hazel from Paula. When he’s not endlessly berating her for her “erratic” life choices (a nod to something mysterious and dark that happened in her past), she’s suffering similar slights as a fact-checker for a newspaper.
Showrunner David Rosen lays the indignities on thick, invoking other queasy pressure cookers like If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Paula’s existence is almost too comically cruel: her nightly sessions with a cam-boy named Trevor (Brandon Flynn) are her only solace, until Trevor is beaten bloody and abducted during one of those sessions. When Paula calls the cops, they tell her she’s probably entering the second phase of an elaborate scam, and that soon, Trevor will call her begging for ransom money. That call does eventually come, and it doesn’t take long for his desperate pleading to turn hard-edged and predatory. If she doesn’t cough up $15,000, he’ll release the sensitive footage he’s been quietly recording. He’ll share it with her family, send it to her boss. He’ll ruin her life just as she’s rebuilding it.
Dark cyber thrills clash with a buzzy murder mystery in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.
What’s cool about Paula is that she’s very capable in her own right (again, a fact-checker!) and not content to give in to any of these demands. Maximum Pleasure’s best moments come via manic montages, scored to a thrumming synth soundtrack and edited for the TikTok-addled brain, when Paula uses the web to sleuth on Trevor and, eventually, defend herself against the network of scammers out to get her. The extent of her investigative powers is, essentially, a thorough Google search, but it works for a woman with precious few resources. The series is a cyber thriller that knows its limits, and its way around an Apple product. Frantic text threads and grainy video recordings deliver exposition and ratchet up the tension, but Rosen is wise to supplement those thrills with flesh-and-blood intrigue, too.
When Paula manages to find Trevor’s apartment, she’s shocked to find his lifeless body in his own bathtub. There’s a murderer on the loose — maybe another disgruntled scam victim looking to get their comeuppance? — but Paula inevitably becomes the prime suspect in the case. That’s good drama, but it also plays into Maximum Pleasure’s most annoying habit: its need to keep Paula on the back foot. The series reminds us that it’s Paula against the world at every turn, but it does so by populating that world with supporting players at varying levels of insufferability. There’s Karl and Mallory perpetually running interference with passive-aggressive peace offerings. There are Paula’s aggressively unfunny coworkers (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg and Charlie Hall), who waste a lot of time sniping about Paula’s awful life before eventually being pulled into the conspiracy, too. Even the detective who first consoled her about being scammed (a great Dolly de Leon) has to antagonize Paula a bit.
Maximum Pleasure’s supporting cast is a mixed bag, but Dolly de Leon is the perfect complement to Maslany.
As a tool to get us on Paula’s side, it’s effective... just not at all subtle. It can make Maximum Pleasure a frustrating exercise; without Maslany, it wouldn’t work half as well. Fortunately, the series knows when to give her the reins and when to push her completely off the rails. If nothing else, you’ll want to keep watching — not only to enjoy another masterclass from the actress, but to watch Paula untangle such a wacky thread.
