Beware the beautiful camboy. And never trust Murray Bartlett. These seem to be the main life lessons to take from Apple TV’s new 10-part series Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed and, the deeper we go into the tense and twisty mass of plot shot through with black comedy, the greater the wisdom becomes.
The beautiful camboy is called Trevor (Brandon Flynn), which I guess explains why he is trying to make it on looks alone. He is the therapist-with-benefits, used by newly divorced mother-of-one Paula (Tatiana Maslany) when she is alone in her apartment because her husband has main custody of their daughter, Hazel (Nola Wallace). There are suggestions of previous instability and erratic behaviour. These are not about to serve Paula well.
Just as Paula and Trevor are about to embark on the more intimate portion of their online time together, a masked man bursts into Trevor’s apartment and starts to beat and strangle him, pausing only to deliver the cryptic utterance “Koh See Tee” down the lens to Paula. With admirable presence of mind, especially as she is down to her bra by this point, she begins filming the attack, then calls the police to report the crime. A superbly phlegmatic policewoman, Det Gonzales (Dolly De Leon), takes down the details and warns her that it is almost certainly a scam. “It’s a nuisance, but it’s not a real crime.”
Sure enough, a sobbing Trevor soon calls, needing $50,000 to pay a kidnapper’s ransom, otherwise he will be killed. Paula puts down the phone and returns to negotiating instead with her husband Karl (Jake Johnson) for better access to Hazel and trying to dissuade him from moving to Idaho with her and his girlfriend, Mallory (Jessy Hodges), for a new job.
Then Trevor calls her at work – on a number she never shared with him – and the tone changes. “We know everything,” an apparent accomplice tells her. She is to pay up or they will destroy her life.
That’s when things really kick off. In the face of continued police indifference, Paula – who is, slightly too on-the-nosedly for a show as otherwise fresh and idiosyncratic as this one, a fact-checker for a magazine – begins to investigate Trevor herself. Using snippets of information he shared and clues from the background of the footage she has of the attack, she tracks down his home address, grabs her daughter’s hockey stick and prepares to bash her way in. But the door is already ajar and, as any viewer knows, nothing good can be waiting on the other side of that.
No spoilers, but the next episode begins with a jump back in time to before whatever was awaiting her behind the door, and we discover where Murray Bartlett fits into the unfolding story.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is a title that holds its product hostage to fortune. The makers were clearly confident of their drama’s quality, and rightly so. It’s a sure-footed and completely bingeable thriller with an edge of unpredictability that holds you doubly fast to your seat. And in Maslany – who won an Emmy for playing 17 different roles in Orphan Black – they have the perfect actor to capture Paula’s mixture of volatility and focus, intelligence and stubbornness. She is innately interesting to watch, and it’s nice to see her rewarded with such a meaty part after surviving the eponymous role in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. I loved it so much, but it was so bad. Bartlett is a fine pairing as Paula’s antagonist and there isn’t a weak link in the cast elsewhere.
You feel like you are getting a lot of bang for your Apple buck. There’s the moreish crime drama, with people dying in increasingly inventive ways as Paula’s discoveries move higher up the crime-food chain. (The only time credibility leaves the chat is when we find out she has two fellow fact-checkers at work, even though nothing else suggests it is Time magazine circa 1935.) There’s a ruthless exploration of our growing fears about constant surveillance and the unseen power, ripe for corruption, that it represents. And there is – in the tricky relationship between Paula and Karl, and interest in the motivations and desperations that lie behind villainous actions – an underlying warmth and compassion. More pleasure than you might have expected, guaranteed.
• Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is on Apple TV now
