Apple TV has, throughout the years, cemented itself as a platform of curiosities, offering televisual projects that resist easy genre categorization. David J. Rosen‘s Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, starring Tatiana Maslany, is no exception, following a single mom fighting for custody when her life is upended by being a witness to a murder.
Or so she thinks.
In the series, Maslany’s Paula, a fact-checker for a reputable news organization, can count her simple pleasures on one hand, squeezed by her demanding boss, equally demanding ex-husband and PTA responsibilities. Between peewee soccer games and assignments, she squeezes in an hour of intimacy with a cam boy named Trevor (Brendan Flynn), with whom she’s grown inordinately close. When one of their calls is interrupted by a break-in and abduction, she immediately phones the police, only to be told that what she saw was an elaborate hoax to extort her. But when she finds Trevor’s body at the end of the pilot episode, it becomes clear larger forces are at play.
Rosen tells Deadline that the concept of the twisty, often buoyant thriller came about during the pandemic, while meditating on his wife’s myriad responsibilities and the increasingly suffocating terms of our digital existence.
“I was thinking about this epidemic of loneliness that we’re in, how a lot of it’s caused by technology. Ironically, the same same tech that you can use to say hi to your grandma is also making us all alone at night,” he explains. “And I was starting to think about a character of a single mom, alone, and trying to reach out using technology to find just one little bit of happiness, and how that could actually spiral into her very own Rear Window as she stared into the window of her computer. And I specifically thought about it as a mom, because the experience of COVID and watching my own wife run around and juggle 800 million things while her phone never stopped buzzing, it really felt like a character who, when put in the position that Paula has been put in, in an unforgiving world which doesn’t give much grace to moms, especially around areas of sexuality, it could really lead to a lot of delicious conflict and excitement.”
Nola Wallace and Tatiana Maslany in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed (Apple TV)
For David Gordon Green, who executive produces and directs the premiere episode, the goal was to set a specific tone early on to serve as a springboard for the rest of the season.
“It’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle in narrative form, and then on top of that, trying to find a propulsion, a pulse of the show that’s going to make it distinctive and make it fun for an audience to watch. It’s not just downward spiral of darkness. There’s levity, and there’s adrenaline within the anxiety that I think make it really appealing. It is a total balance,” he says.
Naturally, he adds, “the score, the music is a very important part of that atmosphere, of making sure there’s something that has enough drive, but also some ambience there to help us decide when we’re in Paula’s head and when we’re watching the [show] and getting excited about what’s next.”
There’s an “enjoyable anxiety” inherent to the show’s DNA, Green says, aided by the hard jump cuts Rosen employed to reflect Paula’s unraveling. The frenetic energy serves to propel the watcher to each new twist and reveal, eschewing a grimness that would otherwise bring down the mood.
In the same way that audiences are trying to unpack the central scheme — or interlocking set of schemes — at the center of Paula’s newfound predicament, so was the Emmy-winning Maslany drawn to the inscrutability of her character.
“I was intrigued by Paula in the sense that I couldn’t get a grasp on her,” the Orphan Black alumna says. “There were so many things she did that I couldn’t relate to, and that was exciting to me, that she was a little bit of a mystery.”
She continues, “She’s at this point in her life where she thought she knew what the rest of her life was going to be like, and she’s sort of coasting or sleepwalking, and then this thing happens — multiple things happen — to wake her up, and now she’s just trying to pick up the pieces and start again and figure out who she is.”
While watchers may have a knee-jerk reaction to side with Paula and her plight — as the narrative largely follows her perspective — Jake Johnson, who portrays her irascible ex-husband, prioritized his character’s concern for their daughter.
“I view Karl as the protagonist. So I understand that from the audience’s point of view, he might be unlikable and do some shady stuff, but I never play characters with that in mind,” he explains. “All Karl is trying to do in his heart of hearts is put his daughter in the best position possible.”
Murray Bartlett in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed (Apple TV)
But if there’s a clear villain in the story, it’s Murray Bartlett’s Dennis, Trevor’s erstwhile boyfriend and an unnerving wild card who, it’s revealed in Episode 2, is behind Trevor’s killing.
“It’s such a great group, and the scripts were so great and so compelling, it just kind of propels along, and it’s surprising and funny, but really dark,” the Emmy-winning The White Lotus alum says. “And so there was a lot of things that really drew me to it. And likewise, with the character that I play, he’s a real chameleon. He just morphs into whatever he needs to morph into to get what he wants out of any situation that he’s in.”
“Turns out, he’s a bit of a sociopath. And that was really fascinating to me,” he adds, laughing at the understatement.
Bartlett admittedly loves to map out a backstory for his characters, and for the particularly meaty role of Dennis, he jumped at the chance to conduct research, reading Sociopath: A Memoir, which he describes as “fascinating,” “revealing” and “dispelling a lot of the myths” surrounding sociopathy. The book, which was like a “Bible” for him, helped demystify of a disorder often depicted but little understood.
“They’re incredible observers of human behavior, because a sociopath doesn’t feel the kind of spectrum of emotions that most of us feel,” Bartlett explains. “She talks about being at parties in college and just sitting there and observing people and learning the social cues and behaviors that would allow her to fit in.”
He adds, “What she talks about is that there’s this feeling of kind of apathy, and then, because you don’t have the release valves that we all have of expressing emotions, that apathy gives rise to this kind of volcano of buildup that has to be expressed somehow.”
In addition to being guided by Patric Gagne’s tome, Bartlett devised a backstory for his character in which he “is very rigid and has this idea about the way that he wants his world to work and his business to work, and doesn’t want anyone to mess with it.”
Episode 2 opens with Dennis and Trevor’s sweet sushi dinner date, seemingly portraying a couple in love, which sets up a “jarring in an amazing way” rug pull for the audience as the former’s true nature is revealed, Bartlett says. Though Dennis lacks empathy, Bartlett says he believes there’s “genuine affection and probably love” in the relationship as “that’s one of the reasons why if things were to go awry, then Dennis’ reaction would be quite intense, because he opened up to someone, and that’s a big deal for him.”
Episode 2 concludes with Dennis finding Paula’s daughter Hazel’s cleats, which had been accidentally tossed outside Trevor’s home. With yet another cliffhanger in tow, Paula inches closer and closer to the truth — and certain danger — setting off a cat-and-mouse game drawing the mom further into Dennis’ criminal orbit.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed airs weekly on Wednesdays. Its first two episodes are currently streaming on Apple TV.
