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Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed sounds like a threat before it sounds like a title. The new Apple TV series follows Paula, played by Tatiana Maslany, a newly divorced mom whose life has become a fun little buffet of custody battles, identity collapse, blackmail, murder, and youth soccer. Maslany, along with creator David J. Rosen, director David Gordon Green, and co-stars Jake Johnson, Jessy Hodges, Murray Bartlett, and Brandon Flynn, spoke with Kyle Meredith about the show’s dangerous mix of true crime paranoia, online intimacy, sex work, dark comedy, and domestic panic. Listen above orwherever you get your podcasts.
Rosen says the show began during the pandemic, when everyone was suddenly staring into each other’s Zoom rooms like amateur detectives. “I started thinking about this epidemic of loneliness that we’re in,” he says, imagining “a single mom who was juggling 800 million different things” and reaching through a computer screen for companionship, only to find herself in “her own modern-day Rear Window.” Green, meanwhile, wanted the series to feel “atmospheric but propulsive,” pulling from Kieslowski and In the Mood for Love while landing inside a New York apartment thriller where screens, paranoia, and bad decisions all keep humming.
Maslany says Paula’s appeal was in how messy and unknowable she could be, calling her “unpredictable” and admitting, “I question all of it. And that’s what I love about her. Maslany says the show, for her, isn’t about internet boogeymen as much as the judgement that comes when a mother tries to claim pleasure. “She’s just trying to pursue some pleasure for herself,” Maslany says, “and I think the sort of way that that pleasure gets turned against her and that it somehow makes her unfit as a mother [is interesting].”
Johnson says the writing hooked him before he even had time to judge it, while Hodges admits true crime is “incredibly dark and exploitative” but also, inconveniently, fascinating. Bartlett describes his character as “very strategic and methodical,” while Flynn says Trevor is “guided by what he thinks he has to do to survive.”
Listen to Tatiana Maslany, David J. Rosen, David Gordon Green, Jake Johnson, Jessy Hodges, Murray Bartlett, and Brandon Flynn talk about Apple TV’s Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed more in the new episode above or by watching the videos below. The series is streaming now on Apple TV.
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