Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed: Season 1

10

I suppose it’s the year of the online sex worker here on this here Apple TV+ service. What with Margo’s Got Money Troubles and now camboy-tastic Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. Not exactly Apple’s typical bent, but 2026 is off the chain, I guess. Though I suppose this series isn’t about sex work, it just uses it as a mechanism to set up the inevitable crime and murder mystery our main character, Paula (Tatiana Maslany), has to solve to free herself from suspicion. All while battling for custody of her young daughter against everyone’s favorite monster, Jake Johnson. Wait, what? Yeah. So, suffice it to say that Paula has some problems. Some murder wrap problems. In her past. In her present. Makes Margo’s issues kinda pale in comparison, I’d say. But Paula is a mess — kind of the quintessential mess that a lot of television makes working mothers into. Which is starting to feel like a bit of a trope. Can working women have it all? Certainly they can, if they don’t mind their only relationships being with obviously gay camboys and maybe picking up a murder charge along the way. It all feels a bit retrograde in its messaging. But what do I know?

First, what is this title? It doesn’t roll off the tongue. It really has very little to do with the show itself. I assume it has something to do with the service the camboy offers our protagonist, Paula, but that’s really the only thing I can figure. Still, though, it makes no sense. Fine, whatever, people are often bad at naming things — especially at Apple. Do you know what Sugar is about based on the title? No you don’t. They’re also bad at naming characters. Paula is in her maybe late thirties and her name is Paula? Her ex-husband, played by Jake Johnson, is named Karl. Not Carl. Karl. What the hell is that? Paula’s young co-workers at a definitely-not-real publication where she works as a fact checker are named Rudy (Charlie Hall) and Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg). I mean Rudy is a funny name, but what Gen-Z American kid is named Rudolph? Charlie Hall’s real-life mom, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, must have been seriously eye-rolling at that one. We must support our best nepo babies, and I support Charlie and his actually-funny character. Just don’t besmirch him with this dumb name.

My totally surface complaints aside, there is something tonally about this series that doesn’t quite get it right. And I know I complain about tone a lot on this here blog thing, but finding that balance between comedy and violent crime is one that’s tough to nail. Maslany can certainly do comedy. Her whole person is very frantic and physical. Not unlike her turn in She-Hulk, where she similarly plays somewhat pathetic and undatable. Which feels a little unrealistic given who she is, but apparently Hollywood has determined that she projects something too wacky to be attractive and worthy of a second date. Point being, her performance feels pretty free, unhinged and funny when it needs to be. But then they sink her in this melodrama where she has to constantly look bedraggled, put upon, scared and about the crack. And she does this well, too. She’s believable and definitely pops off the screen. But there’s too much of the latter and not enough of the former. Instead we need to stick in scenes with the aforementioned young co-workers, Rudy and Geri, who have reluctantly (at first) joined Paula in her crazy. They get the comedy. They get the banter. They get the sitcom back-and-forth. While the stakes increase for Paula, the violence seriously escalates and her skin seems to visually blanch as the pressure on her increase. The jeopardy just outstrips the comedy, and the even the procedural sleuthing she and the two kids do, until the action and violence is all there is. And, yes, there’s a scene where Paula must hide in a closet from a killer. If you have this scene in your script, you need to rethink and redraw your planning.

Going back for a sec. Paula and her busy life working at this magazine (hahahaha) and trying to be a part-time mom to her precocious adolescent child has rendered her social life a non-starter. A job where she seemingly can come and go from at will, not show up and basically doesn’t seem to have daily work to do, but okay… Anyway, instead of going on the apps and getting a date with a nice dude from Queens where she lives, she turns to the Internet and gets off with a camboy named Trevor (Brandon Flynn). During one of their, uh, sessions Trevor is seemingly attacked by a masked assailant and the feed abruptly ends. Paula calls the cops to report it and is connected to Detective Gonzalez (Dolly de Leon). Meanwhile Trevor ends up calling Paula saying he’s being held hostage and they’re asking for $15,000 or he’s going to be killed. Okay, obvious scam. Also, this dude Trevor has been talking to Paula for a while at this point and knows she’s a single mom living on a fact checker’s salary in Queens. Either he’s a really bad scammer, or the writers just kind of ignored the fact that this is a real loser of a scam. Either way, it doesn’t quite hold water. Thing is, the cops know it’s a scam, Paula is finally convinced it’s a scam (and that Trevor isn’t actually in any danger), yet using her fact checking acumen she tracks down Trevor and finds him… dead! Oh, man, that doesn’t look good. Woman duped. Woman scorned. Said duper and scorner found murdered. Paula is in trouble.

As suspicion on Paula mounts, her skeptical young co-workers — who initially think their older compadre is kinda nuts — start to believe she’s the victim of some sort of setup and/or mistaken identity and take up the cause of uncovering who killed Trevor the camboy. Meanwhile, the aforementioned evil Jake Johnson ex is trying to take their daughter to Idaho because his new wife, Mallory (Jessy Hodges ), got some new, fancy job there. Yeah, like there are fancy jobs in Boise. Please. Of course, being under suspicion of murder and having Detective Gonzalez poking around is definitely not going to help Paula’s case to hold onto her half of custody with her daughter. Never mind what happened back in Portland! Yeah, because we need another layer of mystery and trauma in Paula’s past (which I won’t spoil here). To me, that was just one narrative step too far. A hat on a hat, which I believe is what people call it. Anyway, we have the ticking clock element, as Paula works to clear her name in time for the big court case where the judge will decide if she’s an unfit mother and allow Karl and Mallory to whisk her daughter away to some state nobody from NYC can even picture in their heads. All the mechanisms of a murder mystery in place, we watch Paula run around, make calls, circle a lot of stuff with red pen (always the good fact checker), and also coach her daughter’s terrible soccer team while crushing on one of the other soccer parents, the impossibly cutesy, Steve (Raymond Lee).

The thing here is that there is a decent story at the heart of this. It’s set up relatively well in its core plot line. The main cast is great, and Maslany is terrific when she’s allowed to be. It’s everything else that’s a real drag. Murray Bartlett plays this absolutely ridiculous killer character that I wish away every time he’s on screen. It’s not Bartlett’s fault; it’s just a poorly drawn character. He’s constantly lurking in the background being a psychopath in a braindead way that is just not entertaining. Nor realistic. And, even more convoluted and silly, is this deeper conspiracy involving a corporation and wide-spread extortion ring and… It’s just completely unnecessary. It’s not quite The Chair Company, but in some ways it mirrors the thing that that series is seemingly spoofing. There need not always be a grand conspiracy. Or a faceless corporation at the dark heart of every crime. I understand the compulsion to want to get there, but it felt like one leap too far for this story. I have a sneaking suspicion this won’t get a second season — though they clearly set it up for one — but I’d be curious to see where and how they expand on a story that seemed relatively buttoned-up — albeit rather clumsily. Except for Portland. Portland!