Summary
Tatiana Maslany is a delight in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, her frazzled comedic turn anchoring an increasingly serious story that begins to emerge in “Magnets”.
The first switcheroo of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed comes early, and it’s a good indication of the kind of show we’re getting into. These days, Apple TV has cornered the market on comedies with a twist of DNA from another genre. Shrinking is a comedy-family drama, Widow’s Bay is a comedy-horror, and now this is a comedy-crime thriller. There’s a common characteristic in all these shows, beyond being funny first and foremost, and it’s that they’re all really good. At least in Episode 1, “Magnets”, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed fits the bill, and that early rug-pull is part of why.
The premise gives it away a bit, granted, but if you’re going in completely blind, you might not initially realise that Paula, a divorcee going through a custody battle who has just moved into a sparse new apartment, is on a video call not to a friend but a sex worker. Trevor seems to be there for Paula. He listens to her personal issues, which don’t surprise him, and gives her relatively sage advice. It’s only when there are a few minutes remaining on the paid-for session that he volunteers to strip down to help Paula get off. That’s when it becomes obvious that Paula is paying a cam-boy (cam-man?) to play therapist — among other things. It completely shifts the tone of the show.
Paula’s a mess, you see. She has a decent job as a fact-checker at a newspaper — I didn’t realise they still had those! — and seems relatively even-keel, but the neuroses are there. She tunes into Trevor’s streams when she’s sneaking bathroom breaks at work, she’s fretting about her ex-husband, Karl, potentially taking their daughter, Hazel, to Idaho, and given how much money she’s spending on Trev, she doesn’t exactly have her financial priorities in order. And, needless to say, the predicament’s only going to get worse.
The turning point comes when Paula tunes in for one of her nightly streams and witnesses Trev being violently assaulted by a man in a luchadore-style balaclava who speaks in Serbian (“ko si ti”, he says, which Apple TV’s closed captions translated as “pants”). Understandably, Paula reports the incident to the police, represented here exclusively by a diminutive detective named Gonzales, despite her palpable embarrassment at being involved in an “online sex thing”. Gonzalez assumes that Paula has been the victim of a scam and suggests that Trev will likely call in due course, claiming he has been taken hostage and needs money. It’s worth pointing out here that Maslany’s sarcastic line deliveries are absolutely top-tier.
Gonzales is right, for what it’s worth. Trev starts calling Paula, asking for $15,000, claiming he has been kidnapped and will be killed if she doesn’t pay up. An apparent kidnapper, using a voice modulator, says the same thing. Gonzales tells Paula to ignore it, but the calls start getting in the way of her testy custody battle with Karl. He’s already a bit passive-aggressive and unaccommodating, even before Hazel answers Paula’s phone to Trev, and Trev FaceTimes Karl himself. At that point, Karl threatens Paula with supervised visitation, referencing her previous stint of “erratic” behaviour, which I imagine we’ll get more context on as we go.
For now, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Episode 1 continues to justify Paula’s inevitable decision to not leave the Trev thing alone, despite advice to the contrary. Using her fact-checking skills, she pores over the footage of his attack frame by frame, using details in the background to decipher where he lives with an uncanny amount of accuracy. She can’t focus on her job — where Trev was also calling — or Karl and Hazel until she has done something, especially since Gonzales refuses to do so officially.
So, after experiencing a minor meltdown in traffic following Karl’s custody threats, Paula speeds straight to Trev’s house. She finds it empty, apart from a cute cat and, worryingly, Trev’s corpse in the bathtub, his throat having been cut. The killer is downstairs with a power saw and seems to be making his way up. Just when it seemed like this day couldn’t get any worse!
