This is a non-spoiler review for all 10 episodes of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’s first season. The series premieres May 20 on Apple TV with the first two episodes. After that, it will be a weekly release until the season finale on July 15.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed – from director/producer David Gordon Green (The Righteous Gemstones and the recent Halloween trilogy) and creator/showrunner David Rosen – stars Tatiana Maslany (She-Hulk, Orphan Black) as Paula, a divorced mom in the midst of fragile child custody footing who finds herself caught up in a lethal shitstorm involving a camboy con job gone all kinds of sideways. It just might become your next appointment TV addiction… with a few caveats.
Maslany is a powerhouse performer, capable of convincingly conveying all emotions, sometimes even in the same sentence. She’s a whirlwind force in this series, as well as its heart and anchor. Paula has to endure unbelievable stress and trauma while still grasping at whatever hope she can to keep partial custody of her daughter while also maintaining her job and sanity. Paula is the unfortunate victim of “stripper really loves me” syndrome when she gets too emotionally intimate with an online sex worker named Trevor (Brandon Flynn), revealing personal information to him that gets thrown back in her face in a blackmail scheme. From there, things only get worse… and worse… and worse.
One of the more frustrating aspects of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is having your protagonist be behind the eight ball from the word go. She’s either drowning or treading water for 10 episodes, and after a while, it stops feeling organic and just feels like a meta aspect of the series. It’s as if the show itself is just a mechanism of punishment for her, making her run a gauntlet because she has sexual kinks, or for being the starter wife.
Stepping even further back though, the series mirrors certain elements of 2025’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You here, dabbling in existential horror involving motherhood (and also just being a woman) in which every choice you make is wrong, everyone else who seems wrong is actually right, and you’re constantly viewed and judged through a lens of perceived “normalcy”…and failing. I won’t spoil the season finale except to say that Paula has a moment where she’s able to take much of what she’s been judged harshly for and flip it around in her favor; it felt like a massive exhale of relief.
Jake Johnson (New Girl) and Murray Bartlett (The White Lotus, The Last of Us) make for fun oppositional recurring characters, with Bartlett a magnificent clockwork menace on the blackmail side of things, and Johnson as Paula’s ex-husband Karl. It’s not that I need Johnson to only play Nick Miller forever (though he is one of the best TV comedy characters of all time), but he was presumably cast here as someone who could match Paula’s snark. Overall, though, Karl is a big bummer; Johnson seems to be on the roster to keep Karl from being wholly hateable.
While he has windows of compassion, Karl is definitely trying to live out the male fantasy of starting over with a new model of wife while also keeping his daughter and pushing his kid’s actual mother out of the picture. And even if that’s not 100% what Karl is after, new wife Mallory (Jessy Hodges) wants this. So Paula is assailed on all fronts while she fights for her daughter, her freedom (oh yes, she’s a big-time murder suspect), and her life (double yes, since people are trying to take her out).
It’s unfortunate that nothing can be done to erase the mistake of this being an ongoing saga when it should have been a limited series. The finale sets up a second season, and that’s just not the proper packaging for this. Paula endures so much that there’s even a mid-season tipping point where you honestly can’t see a way out for her; what will help you get through this is knowing, or at least hoping, that things will even out by the end. There are seeds of salvation planted here and there: The big ones are Paula’s journalist co-workers, played by Charlie Hall and Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg – two supporting characters who are both symptoms of the streaming series “one long movie” strain while simultaneously serving as background life preservers for Paula. But the last thing this mostly enjoyable gauntlet needs is a big “here we go again!” ending.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed may very well be Maximum Anxiety Guaranteed, but when it clicks, it can crackle with decent intensity. It’s a lot for one woman to endure just to be able to be gifted with the short end of the child custody stick, but if you enjoy twists and turns on top of twists and turns, then by all means dive into the deep end here.
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