Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Practices a Lost TV Art

The new Apple TV thriller Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed rests comfortably within the TV genre of Nice Moms Gone Bad. It stars Tatiana Maslany as Paula, a divorced mom of one precocious daughter who’s just trying her best to get some easy sexual fulfillment in the few stolen hours not consumed by work, school pickup, soccer practice, and tense exchanges with her ex-husband, Karl (Jake Johnson). Paula witnesses a crime over a video chat with her preferred camboy, and the show unfolds from there: investigations, cover-ups, conspiracies, a hidden past, all the usual bits and pieces that make up a domestic thriller.

Many things work in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’s favor, distinguishing it from some of the duller comps in the past several years. (Apple TV’s leaden The Last Thing He Told Me immediately comes to mind.) Maslany is the first and most crucial: She melds together Paula’s many modes so that they feel plausible as one single person, which is no small feat for a woman who switches quickly between frazzled exhaustion and Terminator-esque determination. Paula’s many roles also keep the series from feeling too rote. At various points she acts as both detective and criminal, and the show slips back and forth between Paula being pursued and Paula in dogged pursuit. First she’s trying to draw attention to the crime she witnessed, then she’s somehow implicated in the crime, next she’s trying to prove her innocence, then it turns out maybe she’s not all that innocent after all, and the hole gets ever deeper.

The simplest thing Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed has going for it, though, is one that used to be a well-practiced trope among TV crime series and has lately gotten neglected. Paula has a very specific job, and that job makes her good at dealing with all this crime business. She is a magazine fact-checker. She’s a normal person with a detail-oriented career, and as one of the tragically few remaining magazine fact-checkers with full-time employment in the year 2026, she is also essentially a superhero.

Regular people with weird jobs used to be all over crime TV. In the mid-aughts you couldn’t turn on a new crime procedural without tripping over mathematician detectives, magician detectives, psychic detectives, mystery-author detectives, facial-expression-expert detectives (this one was always a stretch), or a few dozen other implausible professions that happened to make these people especially good at solving a crime. Too much current TV has given up this important feature of the amateur detective: Everything is overweighted toward regular cop detectives; doctor detectives like the ones in Watson, Doc Martin, Doc, and Brilliant Minds; lawyer detectives like Matlock, Elsbeth, and The Lincoln Lawyer; and “this woman is very smart” detectives (High Potential).

“Magazine fact-checker” is a perfect amateur detective job. It makes most implausible detective skills suddenly appear reasonable, because Paula is a one-person “enhance!” machine. She notices all the details in the corners of photos, and she’ll track down the logos on a napkin to find someone’s favorite pizza joint. Even better, she has two fact-checking co-workers (Rudy, played by Charlie Hall, and Geri, played by Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg) who immediately clock the fact that Paula’s started spinning out. Paula’s fact-checking colleagues give Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed a broader tonal brush to play with. They’re younger and more snide, and they puncture some of Paula’s manic energy with their skeptical disdain. Even more crucial for a thriller like this one, Geri and Rudy are too smart to accept Paula’s milquetoast attempts to cover her tracks. Paula has to loop them into her predicament almost immediately, because if she doesn’t tell them they’ll just figure it out on their own.

Some elements of Maximum Pleasure aren’t as neatly tucked into the show’s larger thriller mechanic, the most distracting being Jake Johnson as Paula’s ex-husband. In some scenes he’s perfectly balanced as the co-parent whose reasonable concerns about Paula’s lifestyle become dire threats. Karl’s trajectory from “I’m worried about you” to “I’m worried about custody of our child” is plausible enough to justify Paula’s immense panic. In other scenes, though, Karl becomes cuddly goofball Jake Johnson, and the delight of watching Johnson’s fun himbo patter is undercut by a nagging sense that those scenes are pure indulgence that have nothing to do with this character.

Nevertheless, it is such a relief to watch a thriller where the central figure stumbles over various secrets and does not cling to them like a makeshift raft slowly sinking amid the remnants of the Titanic. The beautiful reality of a show built around fact-checkers is that the truth will come out eventually, and Paula is smart enough to understand that there’s no use hiding for long. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed can’t rely on one crucial piece of information to drive all of its suspense; instead, it goes the much more challenging route of giving everyone as much information as possible. The show is forced to find other, more interesting ways to yank Paula’s life apart at the seams, and throughout it all she has to keep showing up at her day job, marking up manuscripts in red pencil.