Inside Apple’s thriller about online sex scams that no one’s talking about

‘Apple is killing it lately and I love this show! The mix of comedy to thriller is perfect.’

Apple TV shows have been all the rage over the past few months. Elle Fanning’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles boasts a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Matthew Rhys’s Widow’s Bay has been hailed for delivering the ‘plot twist of the year’ in today’s finale.

However, in my opinion, one stellar series is being criminally overlooked – Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. The comedy-thriller has earned glowing reviews, especially for Tatiana Maslany’s performance, and yet it feels as though it’s going under the radar.

‘I love the rollercoaster of the show,’ executive producer David Gordon Green, the director behind films including Halloween Ends and Pineapple Express, tells Metro. ‘That’s what the show is built for, and hopefully people enjoy it.’

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is the brainchild of showrunner David J Rosen, who took inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller Rear Window. Paula (Tatiana) is a single mother who’s caught up in a stressful custody battle, while also dealing with a boss who doesn’t give her the appreciation she deserves as a fact checker.

In her free time, she finds solace by chatting online with Trevor (Brandon Flynn), a webcam boy. She opens up about her life, he offers a kind listening ear, and they have regular video sex. It’s a simple arrangement where both parties benefit – but a spanner is thrown in the works when Paula witnesses Trevor being attacked and kidnapped during their call.

After contacting the police, she discovers that Trevor was actually scamming her and the attack was completely staged. However, that’s only the start of this twisting tale, as Paula finds herself embroiled in the underground world of organised crime, which gets even more harrowing the deeper she gets.

While Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed could be seen as a cautionary tale, warning people against the dangers of sharing too much if they are speaking to sex workers online, Brandon doesn’t feel as though the show ‘had a weird, salacious eye on sex work’.

‘I think it handles it with a delicate hand,’ the 13 Reasons Why actor explains to Metro. ‘It doesn’t point to it as bad or good. It just points to it and says, you can kind of understand why someone does this kind of work, what they benefit from it, what someone else benefits from it, like a client. 

‘Ultimately, we are telling a story about this one scamming incident. But I think it does a good job to look at it in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re looking at the whole industry of sex work as a scam.’

Showrunner David Rosen adds: ‘I think people out there are consenting adults, and they’ll figure their way out through trial and error. We really looked at it as our situation is a very one-off situation in terms of a sex worker who scams you. I think probably most people are safe online with sex workers, but we had a very specific one, so that was the story we were telling.’

Tatiana, 40, is the linchpin of the series, balancing humour and high stakes effortlessly, having previously astounded audiences with her performances in Orphan Black, The Woman In Gold, and She-Hulk.

‘She’s so singular and so extraordinary as an actor,’ says Murray, who plays Frank in the series, Trevor’s older lover who’s keeping a host of secrets hidden up his sleeve.

‘The show really straddles comedy and shadowy stuff in a great way. She’s just so amazing at jumping between the two and merging the two in a way that doesn’t feel jarring. Everything she does is anchored in such honesty and a fresh take.’

While viewers might not be surprised to hear that Tatiana hits the role out of the park, some might be shocked to see her co-star Jake Johnson in a brand new light.

Best known for playing fan-favourite Nick Miller in New Girl, the 48-year-old also voiced Peter B Parker in the masterpiece Spider-Verse animated franchise, and starred in productions including Jurassic World and Minx. 

In Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, he plays Paula’s ex-husband Karl, who frequently displays a massively mean streak in the custody battle against his ex-wife. Did he relish taking on a more dramatic role that could take New Girl fans by surprise?

‘I think it’s a really sweet question, but if I’m honest, I never think about that. I take each job as they come. I think it’s fun when people get shocked, but I don’t have a lot of strategy in terms of the business,’ he says.

‘I think some actors really have strategy of how they want their acting journey to go. I view it more project by project, and life experience by life experience, and is this something I want to jump into? I view them all like chapters of a book.’

With so many thrillers being released on streaming platforms nowadays for viewers to sink their teeth into, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed manages to combine genres without feeling too busy, while also taking its audience by surprise with genuinely unpredictable twists.

‘That’s the fun of a show like this. You get to take a lot of the tropes and things that we’ve come to love in genre thrillers and psychological thrillers and paranoid thrillers, and then add a human quality, a domestic quality, a really relatable sense of place, neighbourhood, community, teams, parenthood,’ outlines director David Gordon Green.

‘Then on top of that, put humour and wit on top, in a way that you and your colleagues, friends and neighbours would have under heightened circumstances, always keeping some sort of perspective, or devil’s advocate.’

There are currently six out of 10 episodes of the show out on Apple TV, with the season finale due to air on Wednesday July 15. If you haven’t watched it already, and you fancy a new addictive binge-watch, I can certainly guarantee you will be entertained.

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is available to watch on Apple TV, with new episodes released on Wednesdays.