‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’ is a cathartic series about cam work, blackmail, and parenting
2026 has been a depressing one (so far) for fematfarle protagonists in major movie releases.
Smaller films like Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail might be breaking ground by focusing on a female octogenarian, but mainstream hits like Apex, Send Help, and The Devil Wears Prada 2 are presenting a wide array of clichés and lazy stabs at female empowerment that are tough to root for. If you aren’t anywhere near an arthouse cinema, things are looking pretty bleak unless you turn to TV.
In contrast to their multiplex counterparts, women on the small screen are living it up. From the bittersweet finale of Hacks to the sweetly life-affirming Margo’s Got Money Troubles, female characters are holding court, and we now have another one to add to the lineup. Apple TV’s Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is a thriller, a comedy, a midlife crisis, and a heart attack all in one.
It stars the great Tatiana Maslany (who gave one of television’s greatest performances in Orphan Black in the 2010s) as Paula, a thirtysomething recently divorced mum whose sessions with a cam boy lead to blackmail and murder. It’s breathlessly suspenseful at some moments, emotionally gut-wrenching at others, and laugh-out-loud funny all the way through. It also features a central character who is wildly maddening and charismatic.
Paula has a rocky past that we don’t learn about until several episodes in. She’s an undervalued fact-checker at a publication in New York, and she doesn’t seem to have many friends. Her ex-husband, played by the perfectly cast Jake Johnson of New Girl fame, is one of those cuddly goofballs who turns out to be a humourless manipulator when it suits him. Even though he’s the one who broke up their marriage through infidelity, he makes it clear that she needs to prove herself if she wants joint custody of their young daughter.
Maslany has such a strong command over her character that it almost seems like a documentary when she’s on screen. Her strength as an actor was put on full display when she played numerous clones in Orphan Black, but here, she is tasked with playing a single character who somehow contains nearly as many secrets and contradictions. Paula is hard not to pity, given the shambolic nature of her life, but she deflects warmth at every stage with an abundance of prickly rage and ruthless competence. With every plot twist and interaction, Maslany somehow retains absolute naturalism.
It’s worth highlighting the supporting cast, though. Series creator David J Rosen has populated the script with an ambitious number of side characters who are played by the likes of Murray Bartlett, who has been waiting for a role worthy of his talents since season one of The White Lotus, Dolly de Leon, who somehow manages to make the tired trope of the homicide investigator freshly eccentric and charismatic, and the dynamic duo of Charlie Hall and Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg, who play Paula’s pesky younger coworkers. It’s one of the rare streaming shows that justifies its format. With so much going on, it needs every minute of its 10 episodes to build out its plot and characters.
There’s a real sense of catharsis in all the ensuing messiness. Paula is hanging on by a thread, coerced from nearly every angle, but she fights back so hard that she nearly loses all sympathy. When the series starts, she doesn’t seem to be in control of her life. She’s pushed to the brink at work in a role that is crucial but nearly extinct in media these days. Her ex-husband and his new partner are trying to steamroll her into submission. And as the blackmail plot escalates, she becomes a target of some very dangerous people indeed.
Instead of being a wronged woman out for revenge or an underdog-turned-superhero, however, Paula shifts between victim, perpetrator, jerk, and enigma. She also becomes an unlikely advertising campaign for the importance of fact-checkers. Despite being overworked and disregarded by her boss, she turns out to have work-related skills that make her a formidable amateur sleuth.
After all the cripplingly predictable and shallow portrayals of “empowered” women in movies this year, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed gives us a female character who is a hurricane of rage, complexity, weakness, and magnetism. At a time when nothing makes sense, and everyone is angry, Paula embodies the moment better than anyone.
