Tatiana Maslany delights as Paula in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.Zach Dilgard/Supplied
Somewhere in Episode 2 of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, the AppleTV thriller whose 10-part first season wraps up July 15, I realized what its creator, David Rosen, was doing – and it delighted me so much I laughed out loud.
Divorced single mother Paula (Tatiana Maslany) may be swept up in a maelstrom of murder and corporate malfeasance in Queens, N.Y., but in the world of this smart, cheeky, nail-biter of a series, that’s just the precarity that any working single mom faces, taken to its logical extreme. (Some spoilers follow.)
Like all mothers, Paula is an adept multi-tasker. She calls the cops while making pancakes. She fends off a hit man’s electric saw with her eight-year-old daughter’s hockey stick. She ponders how to deal with a dead body while searching her apartment for a stuffed rabbit. She processes a recent kidnapping as she’s dancercising at a school fundraiser. She untangles a complex blackmail scheme while preparing for the court hearing where her ex-husband is fighting for sole custody.
The amazing thing about this series, though, is that none of that hits you over the head; it all feels organic. Rosen and his writers embed their message within a genuinely rip-roaring ride.
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When we meet Paula, she has a cordially tense relationship with her ex, Karl (Jake Johnson), and his new wife, Mallory (Jessy Hodges), and she schedules her own sex life with a webcam boy, Trevor (Brandon Flynn), between child care and work. (She’s a magazine fact-checker, and a great one.) Trevor is easy on the eyes and even easier to talk to; when he purrs, “I’m going to make you feel so good, because you deserve it,” it’s exactly what Paula needs to hear.
The series is more than just a study of a single character. Charlie Hall (Rudy) and Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg (Geri) appear as co-workers of Maslany’s Paula.Apple TV/Supplied
Unfortunately, Trevor is also a con artist, and when the small scam he runs on Paula conflicts with a much larger one, Paula is pulled in. Now she has to contend not only with the custody battle, a demanding boss (“I know you have responsibilities beyond this place, but frankly, I don’t care”), snarky coworkers a generation younger, and gossipy school parents, but also a preternaturally calm contract killer (Murray Bartlett), a ruthless corporate fixer (Adam Huber), and a pair of highly competent detectives who pursue her as guilty until proven innocent.
Maslany has never been more excellent, and that’s saying something: On Orphan Black and everywhere else, she’s always been an astonishingly nuanced performer.
In Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, she’s called upon to play a complete woman – sexy, messy, funny, savvy, panicked, frightened, angry, feigning normalcy – and she meets every challenge. Her expressive eyes register each feeling, often in conflicting layers.
Malsany meets every challenge as an actor.Apple TV/Supplied
Though Maslany alone would be enough to carry this series, the other characters’ worlds are also exceptionally well fleshed out. Paula’s coworkers, ambitious Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg) and uncertain Rudy (Charlie Hall), get a full story arc that goes well beyond assisting Paula in figuring out what the blackmailers are after and why the corpses are piling up. (In one of my favourite throwaway lines, Rudy asks Geri if she’s sleeping with the IT guy. “Eww,” she replies. “He has a Band-Aid on every finger.”)
The detectives, too, have a complete relationship: Baxter (Jon Michael Hill), the younger one, wants to go, go, go; Gonzales (Dolly De Leon) has seen it all, but she’s not so jaded that she forgets to be thorough. De Leon is the Filipina actress who was riveting both as the yacht maid who takes over after a shipwreck in the film Triangle of Sadness, and the ex-nun in season two of the Prime series Nine Perfect Strangers. She’s a complete gas here, eating her way through a bag of cashews, dropping divorced-cop koans like, “Love isn’t about getting yelled at all weekend” and “Marriage is a marathon. Sometimes you puke,” and following her instincts, which are always right.
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I love series that make space for unexpected zings of reality, such as a scene where Paula’s kindly lawyer can’t close his office door because there’s a vacuum cleaner in the way; or when, in the middle of a funny confrontation in a pool, the camera suddenly cuts underwater to a woman’s vulnerable bare legs. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed isn’t just a catchy title – it’s also a chilling reminder that our devotion to tech devices leaves us dangerously exposed.
But I have to give the last kudos to Maslany. She’s playing a singular person, and she’s also playing every woman who’s ever been dumped because giving birth made her “exhausted and boring and reek of diapers and breast milk,” and every mother who has ever been accused of “acting erratic again” when really she’s running full tilt to keep ahead of whatever boulder is about to plow her down.
Trying to be a good mother who is nevertheless a sexual being gets Paula into trouble, but being a good mother who’s also great at her job might save her. The scammers who attempt to prey on her “exploitable weakness” – that is, her child – aren’t just messing with the wrong mom. They’re messing with the wrong woman.