Tatiana Maslany stars as a woman whose life takes a bizarre turn in dark comedy Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed
Tatiana Maslany has never been afraid of quick changes. From Orphan Black, where the Canadian actress played 17 clones — often simultaneously — to She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, where she defended other superhumans by day while occasionally turning into the green superhero, Maslany can nimbly move from character to character on short notice. In Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, Maslany plays just one character, but judging by what divorced single mother Paula is faced with, she would probably be better off splitting into three.
It all starts off simply enough, with an emotionally depleted Paula trying to offset her not-so-glamorous day job and her ongoing custody battle with some late-night adult entertainment. But when her “cam boy” is violently murdered onscreen, things take a turn. “I really wanted to tell this propulsive thriller,” says series creator David J. Rosen. “I started with the idea that we’re living in this time of great loneliness. What if we took a single working mom, who one night, while just trying to find a little bit of connection, opens up her laptop, and her own Rear Window-type thriller begins.”
The set-up might be Hitchcockian, but Paula is a bit less centred than James Stewart’s L.B. Jefferies. “She’s in a job where her co-workers are in their 20s. She lives in an area of Queens where she can see the shining lights of Manhattan, but she doesn’t really go there. She has so much to lose and it allows the character to have this raccoon survival energy that she needs if she’s going to get through to the other side,” says Rosen. Now, who better to portray those multitudes than Maslany? “Tatiana’s incredible,” says Rosen. “From the jump, we knew what we wanted and we got so lucky as to get her. She’s so present, has a lot of great ideas, and is an exceptional talent.”
What made the project so interesting from a creative standpoint was that while, on one hand, this was a thriller, there were many other aspects to the series that Rosen and director David Gordon Green nimbly slalomed between. When Paula is at work, the tone is highly comedic, courtesy of her Gen Z coworkers Rudy (Charlie Hall) and Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg). “They’re trying to decide maybe where they’re going to go out that night and she has to go pick up a child,” says Hamagami Goldberg. “She’s this person that they can’t really relate to. But over time, as a friendship grows, as they become more aware of what’s going on in her life. I think that’s what the generational difference [allows for] — they can offer different skills for figuring things out.”
Far less amusing — or amused — are Karl (Jake Johnson) and Mal (Jessy Hodges), Paula’s ex-husband and his new partner. “We were in a very simple story of a custody battle,” says Johnson. “What’s happening to Paula — Karl and Mallory wouldn’t know about that. So, we didn’t want to think about it. From our point of view, if I’m calling Paula and asking for soccer cleats, that’s the biggest thing in the whole world because I don’t want my daughter freaking out because she’s got tryouts. I’m not thinking about, ‘I wonder if Paula has had a really bad morning.’ Your morning is irrelevant. The only morning that matters is this kid’s morning.”
With all of Paula’s worlds, at least in the beginning, running on separate tracks, the cast was as astonished as the viewer presumably will be, when the different pieces all came together. “It was thrilling to watch,” says Hodges. “It’s wild to see all this other stuff going on, because we were just in this little family drama.” The greatest challenge the cast might have had is actually describing the show to other people. “I tell my mom it’s something I know she would like and relate to,” deadpans Johnson. “I said it’s a story of a woman who has a cam boy . . . and then things go sideways. And my mother goes, ‘Yep, that’s me and my group of friends. Say no more. Me and the ladies are watching.’”
For most people, the premise of witnessing a murder online, and becoming the victim of blackmail as a result, may feel far-fetched, but when Rosen was writing the series, he found a way to make it all relatable. “I wanted to write the best version of a thriller I could write and then populate it with people I know, like my friends — funny, witty, cynical — and let them bring the humour and the lightness,” he says. What Green brought to the project as a director was a sense of confusion that mirrors Paula’s. “I wanted a sense of curiosity with the camera,” he says. “Sometimes it feels like the dolly grip is drunk and drifting off into the darkness, or finding an obscure angle or some foreground obstruction. Paula’s apartment was designed with asymmetrical, geometrical lines so that there’s never a clear view anywhere. It’s really fun to be able to play with colours, shapes and lighting and put that into a world that has a raw, relatable reality to it.”
In recent years, shows like The Bear, Beef and Atlanta have given new parameters to what constitutes a comedy. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed does not fall into a clear category, either. For Rosen, neither being beholden to a genre, nor trying to rebel against it, was the goal. “Those shows are incredible and they’ve really broken open our brains a little bit to what’s possible. Every time I’m watching something and it feels like they found a new word for ‘new,’ it always excites me,” he says. “Personally, I was not thinking about that at all in doing this. I was trying to think about telling this story the best way it could be told. And, as you’re doing it and realizing it is the best way it could be told, sometimes you stumble into something that feels fresh, which is what I hope we have done as well.”
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, streaming Wednesdays on Apple TV