I was drawn to this week’s show for the worst reason. That name is pure critic bait, and I like my fruit low-hanging. Other famously pre-roasted works include the films The Happening and Fantastic Four, and the Oasis album Be Here Now. (No, thanks.) In my schadenfreude-soaked soul, I wondered if Apple’s show might join them. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed (Apple TV, from Wed)? Do I need the warranty?
It stars Tatiana Maslany, who also led the brilliantly titled, if widely slated, show She Hulk: Attorney at Law. No one doubts Maslany’s chops. She won an Emmy playing 17 distinct clones in the sci-fi series Orphan Black. Here she plays Paula, a divorced mother going through a custody battle. Paula’s only access to intimacy is with a young online sex worker named Trevor. Despite his name, Trevor is beautiful, like Jeff Buckley. I suppose Jeff isn’t the most exotic name either.
Anyway, Paula pays Trevor to act as her virtual therapist, and also remove his clothes to help get her off, if there’s time left in the hour. You could say their relationship is entirely digital, in several senses. On one of their calls, Trevor answers a knock at the door, and is savagely beaten by a masked intruder – a crime to which Paula is the only witness. Have the Chatroulette years of the internet taught us nothing?
The police dismiss it as a scam; sure enough, blackmailing calls arrive. But Paula is convinced there’s more going on and, armed with her daughter’s hockey stick, starts her own investigation. She interviews various pornified cam-boys and attracts the attention of a crime boss, as she’s drawn into a twisted web. While there is no such thing as a perfect victim, Paula herself is far from either.
Scammers are familiar to us all, yet shadowy. They arouse our sense of vengeance: why are you doing this? How dare you prey on vulnerable people? We might have another curiosity, even sympathy: why are you doing this? Are you in a bad situation? Films such as Punch-Drunk Love and The Beekeeper exploit the first instinct. This is a show more interested in the second.
Not that there isn’t plenty of lizard-brain retribution and imaginative violence in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. Killings involving nail-guns, expanding foam guns and just straight-up guns, equal anything in The Wire or The Equaliser. Funnily enough, the weapon that had me wincing was the lid of a can of tuna, which is embedded in someone’s arm after a fall into a dumpster. I approach my recycling with trepidation now.
It’s a stressful show, but what really spiked my cortisol was the repeated use of a trope we should probably retire. It’s the quick cut montage in which someone’s phone repeatedly dings loudly, meaning messages are piling up, to an EDM soundtrack. Who under the age of 60 has audible message notifications on? Why wouldn’t you silence them? Think of the people around you! You work in an office!
As for that office – Paula works as a fact-checker for a newspaper. This paper, in fact, employs three fact-checkers, which reassures me that print media is in rosy health. She simply walks out of her job quite often, to meet a sex worker in an abandoned house or what not. Forget the police, where are HR? Arguably Paula’s most thrilling transgression is swiping a box of doughnuts marked with a “reserved for web dev mtg!!” sticky note. Now that’s relatable.
It’s implausible yet enjoyably twisty, with Maslany superbly watchable – as are her antagonists. The White Lotus’s Murray Bartlett returns – hurrah! – taking us squarely into No Country for Old Men territory. Jake Johnson – or Nick from New Girl as I will always see him – is Paula’s ex-husband. Filipina actor Dolly de Leon plays a diminutive detective with a dry wit and unexpected vices, who brilliantly skews the archetype of the misanthropic cop. “Marriage is a marathon. Sometimes you puke,” is one of her gnomic pearls.
“A good amount of pleasure if you like this sort of thing” would be more accurate, but a weaker title. Anyway, I didn’t get my schadenfreude hit. I’m going to hang out next to a traffic camera in Chelsea and watch Teslas get tickets instead. OK, maybe after one more episode.