Television has the OnlyFans bug, as evidenced first by Euphoria, then by Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and now by Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a 10-part Apple TV crime series (May 20) from David J. Rosen about a woman who gets herself into an insane mess by patronizing a cam boy.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly sexy or suspenseful about this descent into a world of online hustlers and scammers, which flails in its attempts to generate quirky excitement from a stew of murder, porn, fraud, and family issues. Busy without being steamy, and off-the-wall without being funny, it fails to deliver what its title promises.
Paula (Orphan Black and She-Hulk‘s Tatiana Maslany) is in upheaval, thanks to a New York City magazine fact-checking job that isn’t leading to the promotion she’s been promised and an ongoing battle with her ex-husband Karl (Jake Johnson) over their third-grader daughter Hazel (Nola Wallace).
Making matters worse, Karl’s new partner, Mallory (Jessy Hodges), has been offered her dream job, the catch being that it’s in Boise, Idaho, putting Paula and Karl’s shared-custody arrangement in jeopardy—and eventually motivating him to bribe her to relocate with them.
With so much up in the air, the sole me-time Paula gets is when she logs onto a sex site and chats with Trevor (Brandon Flynn), a charismatic young hunk who listens to her rant about her chaotic circumstances before helping her pleasure herself.
In this regard, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed paints the carnal corners of the internet as places where the lonely and despondent find a brief measure of solace. Rosen’s show, however, knows that it’s also a dicey den of iniquity where the deceitful and manipulative lurk, and Paula learns that the hard way when, during one session, Trevor is brutally accosted by a masked intruder—a traumatic incident which the cop with whom she speaks, Detective Sofia Gonzalez (Triangle of Sadness’ Dolly De Leon), assumes is a scam.
[Warning: minor spoilers follow]
Sofia is no dummy, as Paula is soon inundated with calls from Trevor and his captor, demanding money and showing they know all about her and are willing to pressure Karl into forcing her to comply.
In response, Paula goes sleuthing in order to locate Trevor. This promptly lands her in lethal water, most of it having to do with an enigmatic and nefarious figure who, because of his involvement with Trevor and desire to keep his sordid dealings secret, pursues Paula. Meanwhile, Paula swiftly becomes the prime focus of Sofia and her partner Baxter (Jon Michael Hill), whose main job in this affair is to crack jokes about Sofia’s sports-gambling habit and to dote on his adopted cat.
Baxter and Sofia’s pedestrian banter is emblematic of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’s strained tone, and so too is the similar repartee of Paula’s coworkers Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg) and Rudy (Charlie Hall), the former a go-getter and the latter a wisecracker. Rosen imagines these characters as snappy and sarcastic, but they mainly come across as irritating and bland, undercutting the material’s wannabe dark-yet-wacky tone. Worse, the reliably amusing Johnson is given no opportunities to charm, his Karl a jerky killjoy whose efforts to take Hazel away from Paula are, no matter her screwy situation, unreasonable, callous, and off-putting.
Maslany strives to pick up the slack in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed by making Paula’s ordeal simultaneously harrowing and bleakly hilarious. At least at the outset, her plummet into a dangerous and deviant hole from which she can’t easily escape boasts some out-of-control verve. At the same time, though, it’s difficult to completely sympathize with Paula, whose problems stem from the fact that she stupidly and recklessly overshared with a sex-worker stranger—acts of inanity which may be an outgrowth of her emotional need but still prove inexcusable for a parent trying to hold onto her kid.
Simply put, she’s done this to herself, and everything that ensues is so over-the-top that it registers as preposterous, even as Rosen and his collection of directors (including David Gordon Green) situate their tale in a recognizable modern-day reality.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is at once far-fetched and not far-fetched enough, and that remains the case even after Paula tracks down those who know Trevor, such as fellow cam model Sky (Daniel Dale). Death lurks around every corner for Maslany’s heroine, but not really, since there’s no genuine danger to this narrative, nor much in the way of surprise. The more tangled her dilemma becomes, the less intriguing it grows, and the culprits behind Paula’s misfortune are so featureless that it all comes across as half-hearted and colorless.
Unlike Margo’s Got Money Troubles, whose fantasy required a laughably unrealistic depiction of OnlyFans, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed embraces the darker side of the X-rated web, recognizing that it’s populated by untrustworthy charlatans eager to exploit the naïve.
The longer it proceeds, however, the more that angle becomes merely window dressing for a broader censure of corporate villainy. That left turn is almost as underwhelming as the romantic flirtation shared by Paula and single-dad soccer coach Steve (Raymond Lee), who pops up now and again to lend a bit of hope for the heroine as she flees danger, combats unjust charges, and battles to stay by her beloved daughter’s side.
Throughout Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a bleaker and wittier version of its story often seems to be fighting to emerge, one in which there are actual stakes or, better still, effective jokes. But as it adds murderous complications to Paula’s predicament, its believability wanes and, with it, any of the momentum that defined its initial installments.
Maslany plays Paula as a frazzled every-mom desperate to prove herself a good person and parent, and the seriousness with which she approaches the role means the series is never wholly absurd. Nonetheless, a big secret about the protagonist’s past is one of many ways in which the proceedings feel overstuffed, and the finale’s dutiful establishment of loose ends and potential future headaches for Paula and company just accentuate the sense that more is, in this case, less.
