A star rating of 2 out of 5.
Tatiana Maslany famously played multiple roles in her breakthrough, Orphan Black, so she doesn’t mind being integral to a show’s success. In Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed she has just the one character to play, that of magazine fact-checker and chaotic, divorced mother-of-one Paula – but her personality still drives what is otherwise a mystery thriller that’s hard to invest in.
During her numerous nights in alone, Paula enjoys paying for video chats with male sex workers (lacking friends in real life, Paula pays for an hour of naughty time, but they spend the first 54 minutes just chatting about their lives) until her favourite young man is, apparently, violently kidnapped during one of their intimate Zooms.
Is it a scam or has Paula witnessed a crime? She turns detective, risking the scorn of her colleagues, her ex-husband and the police, and potentially putting her own life in jeopardy.
Maslany is excellent in this Apple TV series as an intelligent, curious, self-destructive woman who, since she was pretty much at the end of her tether anyway, is not minded to accept sensible advice. She’s particularly convincing in the scenes where we see why Paula has arrived in her mid-30s to find herself bitter and isolated: a recurring motif is her rubbing someone up the wrong way, which is sometimes her fault, sometimes theirs and usually both. Life just doesn’t quite click for her.
The lead performance will make you want to see whatever weird thing is about to happen to Paula next. The problem is the vehicle Maslany has been put in, a tangled shaggy-dog story that doesn’t want to commit to a single coherent storyline or genre.
The guts of the narrative is a thriller where an ordinary person stumbles into a world populated by dangerous people who aren’t expecting this schmuck to be as resourceful or persistent as she turns out to be, but the tone is that of a dramedy about a cynical urbanite dealing with the medium-consequences challenge of trying to grow up and stop screwing up their work and personal life.
The point is that the adventure Paula goes on causes her to find herself, but by the time you get there you may well have shrugged and lost interest in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. (Why is it called that, when the video sex seems to be a MacGuffin? If the producers found it hard to decide on a name for their show, perhaps that ought to have been a warning that its purpose isn’t clear enough.)
Watch the first two episodes and then try to summarise what’s happened for the benefit of someone who hasn’t seen them – you’ll probably struggle and end up fielding a string of exasperated questions, which cannot be a good sign. It’s a show about an extraordinary thing happening to an ordinary person, which would probably be a better show if the extraordinary thing didn’t happen.
If this is less than the sum of its parts, though, many of the parts are pretty good. Dolly de Leon brings a tired energy to Detective Sofia Gonzalez, the detective who has seen just about every type of criminal shenanigan before and will still narrow her eyes witheringly at you if yours manages to be new.
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As Paula’s often exasperated ex, Karl, Jake Johnson mirrors Maslany’s measured performance by being neither a patient saint nor a total swine: like her, he believably plays someone who’s better at spotting other people’s flaws than recognising his own.
There’s also a fearsomely competent and devious villain on the loose, played by a notable actor it would be a mild spoiler to name.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is not, then, without its pleasures, but if the hook doesn’t have enough pulling power, it’s destined to be overlooked and forgotten. Paula is searching for an outlet for her talents, if indeed she has any – Tatiana Maslany’s ability is not in question, but here it goes to waste.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed will be available to watch on Apple TV from 20 May.
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