To have one OnlyFans-themed show debut on Apple TV this spring seems timely; to have two feels either like an acknowledgment of just how much our most intimate relationships are mediated through screens now, or like a cry for help. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, created by David J. Rosen, stars Tatiana Maslany as Paula, a professional fact-checker and divorced mother in the middle of a messy custody battle whose preferred way of decompressing is videochatting with a beguiling online performer named Trevor (Brandon Flynn). Their interactions usually end up being sexual, but what seems even more compelling to Paula is having someone to talk with—someone who listens, asks thoughtful questions about her life, and pays her genuine, if compensated, attention.
During one of their calls, Trevor gets up to answer the door and is attacked by a masked man while a horrified Paula can only watch, recording everything she sees on her phone. When she goes to the police, she’s told it’s likely a scam—that she’ll soon get a call asking for money, which she does, from a supposedly distressed Trevor. And when Paula calls him out over the phone, he tells her the truth: He’s recorded all of their meetings, he knows everything about her, and if she doesn’t pay, he’ll ruin her life. “I don’t want that for you,” he says, cruelly. “I like you, Paula. You know that.”
[Read: Life isn’t easy in the OnlyFans economy]
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed seems consciously to be aping classic nervy thrillers. Its opening scene, which has a camera trail slowly over the exterior of a New York City apartment building, nods to Rear Window, with its wild array of sunbathing, dancing, bickering neighbors, carefree and fully exposed. In Paula’s building, conversely, the blinds are all at least semi-closed, as though its inhabitants have become wise to the idea that anyone could be looking in. Paula’s open laptop, of course, suggests new avenues of vulnerability. Some context: During the time I spent watching the series’ 10 episodes, I received five scam calls, three book-club-scam emails, a few weak-sauce phishing attempts, and several Instagram spam messages about crypto-investing opportunities—the kind of online pollution so standard now that it’s barely noticeable, at least until it’s potentially catastrophic. Paula is unlucky, but she also, thrillingly, refuses to acquiesce. Using her professional verification skills, she pores over the details from her recording of Trevor’s “assault” until she identifies his location, then furiously decides to pay him a visit—an expedition that naturally goes very wrong.
All good thrillers exploit uncertainty, and yet this one shifts ground so readily that it can sometimes be hard to dig in. Tone-wise, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed falls somewhere between dark topical mystery and quirky divorce comedy; Paula is besieged both by the people trying to blackmail her and by her squirrelly ex-husband, Karl (Jake Johnson), who wants to tear up their custody agreement so he can move with their daughter and his new wife to Boise. (However accustomed you might be to seeing Johnson play a chaotically schlubby dreamboat, he’s fully against type here as a manipulative and condescending jerk.) I was absolutely on board for a drama about a professional fact-checker redirecting her skills to solve crimes (finally!). But Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed almost immediately veers off into wild subplots about murder, corruption, and corporate malfeasance, as if to emphasize that low-level romance scams are just the tip of the internet’s fetid iceberg.
Watching, I sometimes felt unmoored by the show’s constantly shifting vantage points, especially with regard to Paula. Maslany is an intense and engaging performer in the role; as Paula, she’s as committed to getting the dynamics of an Instagram banana dance right for her daughter as she is to finding out the real identity of the scammers. But the show doesn’t seem to want us to know who Paula really is. An elder Millennial, she has her phone’s volume permanently on high like a theatergoing Boomer, but she’s also as naive and trusting as a child. There are allusions to previous crises she’s gone through that contributed to the end of her marriage, and mysterious references to a past event in “Portland” that suggest Paula might be suffering from mental illness or some kind of delusion. But the series is also clear about the layers of scammery that are piling atop her like a grand fraudulent mille-feuille. David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), who directs the first episode, depicts Paula through windows and screens, her eyes seen as a fragment in a car mirror, or her face murky and pixelated as if she’s on camera. The overall effect is pleasantly unsettling, reminding us of all the many ways people might be watching.
As far as the OnlyFans of it all (reimagined here as a fictional site called CamPop), Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed doesn’t entirely judge Paula for wanting a sex life she can fit into her sparse off-hours, but it doesn’t not judge her, either, underscoring the erratic behavior and questionable judgment that make her and her family vulnerable. Unlike the recent Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a series intent on adding human texture to all our preconceptions about online adult performers, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed seems more interested in the dramatic potential of intimate deceit. What is storytelling if not its own scam, its own manipulation of our confidences and expectations? In this case, the trick is an intriguing one, but you may have some doubts.
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