AppleTV's Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is heading into its final stretch, with the 10-part first season set to wrap up July 15. Tatiana Maslany plays Paula, a divorced single mother whose life keeps tilting from domestic routine into danger.
That is the hook viewers are searching for now: a limited run with an end date, and a lead character who spends part of her day making pancakes while calling the cops. Paula lives in Queens, N.Y., works as a magazine fact-checker and tries to keep child care, work and a custody battle in motion at the same time. She also schedules her sex life with Trevor, a webcam boy played by Brandon Flynn who is also a con artist, which gives the series its strange mix of ordinary pressure and openly heightened chaos.
David Rosen's creator approach makes that mix the point. In Episode 2, the writer realized what Rosen was doing with the series: he was treating Paula's single motherhood as a sharper version of the precarity faced by working single mothers, then pushing it through a thriller engine. The show keeps the tone deliberately unstable, moving from jokes to dread without pausing, so Paula can be dancercising at a school fundraiser one moment and untangling a blackmail scheme before a court hearing the next.
That balance is what keeps the first season from playing like a simple genre exercise. Paula has a cordially tense relationship with her ex, Karl, played by Jake Johnson, and his new wife, Mallory, played by Jessy Hodges. Around that domestic knot are murder, blackmail, workplace pressure and corporate malfeasance, with Murray Bartlett as a preternaturally calm contract killer and Adam Huber as a ruthless corporate fixer. Even the details land with a jolt: Paula fends off a hit man's electric saw with her eight-year-old daughter's hockey stick, then later has to decide what to do with a dead body while searching her apartment for a stuffed rabbit.
The season's remaining question is not whether the show is headed for another twist; it is how much of Paula's life can be squeezed into one finale before the run closes on July 15. The answer matters because the series has already defined its world as messy, funny, sexy and dangerous at once, and the final episode will have to pay off all four without losing the woman at the center of it. On Orphan Black and elsewhere, Maslany has long been described as an astonishingly nuanced performer, and this role gives her another place to prove why that reputation has stuck.
