Paula is slammed. Her boss is dangling a promotion in the hopes of stretching her 40-hour workweek to new, unhealthy limits. Her ex-husband is suing her for custody of their adolescent daughter, with the intention of moving them both from Queens, New York to Boise, Idaho. She just got a new apartment that needs to be furnished and decorated before her kid can sleep over, and her to-do list is still overrun with school drop-offs and pick-ups, soccer practices (which need a new coach), and bake sale treats (which need, you know, baking).
So can you blame her for spending six minutes on herself? For a little fun? For a few brief seconds of pleasure? When we first meet Paula (Tatiana Maslany), she’s trying to set up her cable box, and decorate the apartment, and eat dinner, while squeezing in a video chat with a young man who sounds like an old friend. Trevor (Brandon Flynn) mocks Paula for remaining corded in a cord-cutting TV world, he goads her for hanging a painting of a goat on the wrong wall, and he reassures her that she’s doing everything she can, as well as she can do it.
“Beginnings are the hardest part,” Trevor says.
“No, endings are the hardest part,” Paula says. “Beginnings are full of promise. Like, maybe just this one time instead of getting fisted by the giant puppeteer in the sky, I’ll find love or happiness, or maybe even just a $20 bill on the ground. But then, if this is the good, happy part of my life, I may as well just cut it short and take a bath with the toaster.”
As her unburdening reaches its fraught nadir, one more truth tumbles out: Trevor’s not an old friend. He’s not really a friend at all. He’s a cam boy, and the virtual boyfriend experience he’s providing Paula only lasts as long as she’s willing to feed the meter. When he warns her they’ve only got six minutes left, she chooses a quickie over re-upping for another hour.
Be that because she doesn’t have time to keep video-chatting or can’t afford to indulge in an extended session, “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” makes it clear Paula’s going to have to pay, one way or another, for whatever pleasure she can get. She’ll have to pay with the money she makes from one of the last salaried fact-checking jobs on the planet. She’ll have to pay with the time she could otherwise devote to her daughter, or her career, or her friends. She’ll have to pay with her lack of time and her lack of money, too, by squeezing her hard-won leisure hour into six minutes.
Ain’t that just the way of the world?
Before one of Paula’s few real-life friends can tell her to touch grass, her situation goes from identifiably overextended to overtly terrifying. During their next session, Trevor is attacked. The masked man who beats Trevor up on camera soon gains access to his files, which include recordings of his conversations with Paula, and threatens to expose them to the world if she doesn’t pay up. Considering that “frequenting a virtual sex worker” wouldn’t look too good on a court document, let alone in her daughter’s impressionable mind, Paula has a choice to make: back down or step up?
And, despite Paula’s jam-packed slate, what kind of thriller would “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” be if she chose the former?
David J. Rosen’s half-hour drama balances its two halves well — the heightened anxiety of living under a deluge of life-changing (or life-ending) catastrophes, and the peculiar persistence of “ordinary” activities. Relatively minor demands like editorial deadlines and laundry duty seem insane to focus on when you just found a dead body or are in the midst of unraveling a corporate conspiracy. But is doing so any more insane than punching the clock, picking up your dry cleaning, or whatever else you did during our most recent countdown to nuclear annihilation?
“Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” serves as an exaggerated allegory for modern life slammed into a straightforward chronicle of it — and, as a hat-tip to the series’ accuracy, sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart. Rosen, the former “Hunters” and “Citadel” writer, keeps the pace up and the preaching down, trusting an affable cast with a twisty, steadily expanding story, rather than forcing them to make big speeches about how hard it is to just have fun in 2026, even when it’s more necessary than ever, even if it’s just for six minutes.
We all need a break. More to the point, we all need help, and Paula’s not getting it from her ex, Karl (Jake Johnson), who’s so focused on building a new life with his co-worker turned romantic partner Mallory (Jessy Hodges), that he doesn’t want to consider the life his ex-wife is still living; she’s also not getting any help from her manipulative boss, Suzie (Tara Summers), although her fellow fact-checkers, Rudy (Charlie Hall) and Geri (Kiarra Hamagami), offer support when they can; and she’s certainly not getting any help from the social safety nets designed to keep innocent people from losing everything at the hands of evil, uncaring assholes. (I can’t get into who embodies the toxic reach of private equity without spoiling the season’s early twists, but you’ll know evil when you see it.)
Paula is, as she tells a callous cop looking to quickly close her case, “a regular fucking person” caught in an extraordinary situation. Getting scammed online may not make her unique, but blackmail, murder, and conspiracy elevate her nightmarish experience enough to capture the harrowing feeling of living through unprecedented times. Such a relatable perspective proves potent, as Paula’s deft (and not-so-deft) juggling of the actually serious and subjectively serious grows more and more panicked, her problems grow more and more dire, and her solutions grow further and further out of reach.
Lassoing them all together is Maslany, an actor whose Emmy-winning performance playing multiple clones in “Orphan Black” (and a larger-than-life lawyer in Marvel’s “She-Hulk”) highlights her chameleonic prowess and magnetic screen presence, while de-emphasizing her more traditional strengths as a dramatic actor: She listens attentively. She reacts appropriately. She can take a big speech and deliver it with a frankness that makes you believe she thought it all up on the spot, and she can hold a small silence with such dynamic emotion you can’t look away. Paula may be a regular person caught in an extraordinary situation, but Maslany never lets the latter overwhelm the former — she doesn’t try to make any moment bigger than it feels, and in doing so, she draws you into Paula’s plight with empathetic conviction.
At midseason, “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” can feel a bit stretched. Not every character gets the thoughtful unpacking they deserve, and it’s unclear if the premise is sustainable as a series. (I’m tempted to advise everyone to turn off Episode 10 before the last-second cliffhanger hits.). But the overall execution is solid (everything makes way more sense than recent “average folks do crime” shows like “Big Mistakes” and “Imperfect Women.”), the cast is charming (shout-out to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ son, Charlie Hall, for escaping Ryan Murphy-land), and the parallels between Paula’s experience and our own prove unmistakable, persuasive, and cathartic. If buying a streaming subscription counts as paying for pleasure, your satisfaction with “MPG” is all but, well, you know.
Grade: B
“Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’ premieres Wednesday, May 20 on Apple TV with two episodes. New episodes will be released weekly through the finale on July 15.
