Tatiana Maslany Could Make Anything Work, Including a Dead Cam Boy Thriller

In Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, Tatiana Maslany plays Paula. Paula has a lot going on in her life. She’s in a custody battle with her ex, Karl (Jake Johnson), over their young daughter. She’s a reporter at a Portland (Oregon) newspaper trying to keep her boss happy. Oh, and she’s really into a cam boy named Trevor (Brandon Flynn).

Unfortunately, Paula shares too much personal information with Trevor during their sessions. He fakes a break-in and kidnapping to scam her by insisting on a ransom or he’ll die. Paula goes to the police, who send out Detective Sofia Gonzalez (Dolly De Leon). The detective confirms it’s a scam but can’t do much about it. Trevor keeps coming, though — calling her at work, calling her ex-husband, begging for that ransom — so Paula uses her reporting instincts to piece together where he lives. She goes to confront him, only to find that he’s actually dead.

How did he die? We know, though Paula does not, that the culprit appears to be Trevor’s sugar daddy (Murray Bartlett). But Detective Gonzalez suspects Paula; the sugar daddy is trying to track her down; the ex-husband is weaponizing what he knows about the situation in the custody fight; and a co-worker may be about to blow up Paula’s confidence with a story of her own.

Oh, and there’s a very hot guy named Steve (Raymond Lee), a dad from the soccer team of Paula’s daughter. You don’t cast Raymond Lee unless something is absolutely brewing there.

So what exactly is going on? There’s a mystery, but it’s less about who killed Trevor than why. And Paula is, after only two episodes, wedged into a deeply uncomfortable situation — prime suspect in a cam boy’s death, custody on the line, professional life one bad day from implosion.

Two episodes in, it works. Tatiana Maslany could make almost anything work, but her manic, barely-contained energy doesn’t just carry the series, it propels it. The writing, from David Rosen, is sharp without being showy, and David Gordon Green sets pace and tone with a premiere episode that’s excellently shot and moves with confidence.

It’s good. And if Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed can maintain that pace and its darkly comic tone while building out the mystery, it has every chance to be even better than the first two episodes suggest. Or it could all fizzle into a standard cat-and-mouse thriller. But honestly, with Maslany, even that would work just fine.