When people don’t trust cops, I get it. Remind me to tell you all about the cop who tried to bust me for “underage drinking” at age nineteen, when I’d merely been enjoying an Arizona Iced Tea in a friend’s car.
Still, sometimes you do kind of have to call the cops.
For example – if you see a dead body in a bathtub and the killer ends up chasing you? Definitely call the cops.
When the friends of the dead guy decide to tie you up so they can hand you over to the killer and you miraculously get away? Absolutely call the cops.
When the killer finally catches and kidnaps you and you have to shoot your way out of being murdered in the trunk of a car? Time to call the cops.
What I am describing here is my chief complaint about Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed on Apple+. The heroine single mom Paula Sanders (wonderfully rendered by Tatiana Maslany), is meant to be spiky and mistrustful. A lot of people have fucked Paula over in life, and that’s before she becomes an unwitting player in the saga of a murdered cam boy turned scammer.
We get it, Paula expects nothing good from the people who surround her.
Still, as far as plot devices go, Paula’s insistence to almost never speak to police is borderline insane. I feel like the writers could have done something different to drive this story forward at its most crucial moments.
Having said all that, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is otherwise off to an incredible start as a series. Maslany’s performance is top notch – even during Paula’s more inexplicable side quests (a past subplot involving a car accident that may not have been an accident ultimately gives her erratic behavior more explanation).
Maslany is joined by perfect sidekicks in Charlie Hall’s Rudy and Kiara Hamagami Goldbegr’s Geri (and no, I will never get tired of pointing out that I followed Charlie Hall’s Tiktok way back when). Think of an overwhelmed millennial mom with an angel and a demon on her shoulders – they’re both Gen Z, they both try to be too clever, to their own detriment, and they frequently switch roles.
When trying to get to the bottom of the murder to which she is the only witness, Paula performs complex open-source investigations on her laptop (as a fellow OSINT mom, I was extremely pleased by this) AND exists as a reminder that the loneliness epidemic can lead a person down a bizarre and twisted path (another favorite topic of mine).
Then there is Paula’s custody battle with her ex-husband (Jake Johnson, who frequently looks like a kicked dog, so much so that you can’t hate him), who is sometimes a villain and sometimes just an exhausted, well-meaning schlub torn between the women in his life.
There is Dolly de Leon as Detective Sofia Gonzales, who has a gambling problem and a lack of faith in her younger partner. And that’s beside Murray Bartlett’s absolutely wicked performance as a glamorously gay criminal for whom murder is just good business.
I really like this show. It’s completely deranged and surprisingly tender. It perfectly captures the detritus of modern life, from sketchy Amazon deliveries to the dubious overlords of online sex work to being completely overwhelmed by the notifications on your phone.
It’s a narrative that shows how easy it is to go insane in a world where we’re both connected and disconnected from each other.
And it’s a good reminder that sometimes, you have to put your big girl pants on and call the goddamn cops.