Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | June 19, 2026
The best new show of 2026 is Widow’s Bay. That should not be in dispute. It’s new, inventive, and twisty, and it combines horror with a very specific brand of small-town comedy in a way that’s never really been done on television.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is also very good. It is not, as Stephen King recently suggested, better than Widow’s Bay.
That’s particularly high praise coming from King, given his own fingerprints on Widow’s Bay. But this isn’t really a piece about Widow’s Bay, which we’ve already discussed exhaustively. It’s a piece about Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, and specifically about Steve, the character played by Raymond Lee.
Let’s back up before we start speculating. (And there are spoilers forthcoming through episode 6, “Rosebuds.”) The series follows Paula (brilliantly played by Tatiana Maslany), who gets tangled up in an extortion ring after becoming one of its victims. Here’s the setup: cam boys (and presumably cam girls) get overly invested in their clients, cultivate intimate relationships, and extract personal details that the syndicate running the operation then uses for blackmail.
In Paula’s case, the blackmailer was Trevor, who tried to scam her into wiring a large sum of money to “rescue” him after he staged his own kidnapping. Paula, trying to put an end to the extortion, tracked Trevor down — only to discover he’d actually been murdered by Dennis (Murray Bartlett), the syndicate’s enforcer. Dennis is the guy who disposes of anyone who gets in the way, and he’s racked up an impressive body count doing it.
His next target was supposed to be Paula herself, since she’d learned enough to tie Dennis to at least two murders. At the end of episode six, Dennis kidnapped her, threw her in his trunk, and clearly intended to finish the job. But Paula had wisely bought a gun in the previous episode, so when Dennis popped the trunk to grab her, she shot him instead. He may or may not be dead. I think he is.
Either way, Dennis answers to someone, and that’s almost certainly where the final four episodes are headed. So who’s running things?
I mean — it has to be Steve, right? Steve is too good to be true: a charming, divorced soccer dad who’s clearly been flirting with Paula. He showed up in this week’s episode to help her get ready for the pizza party, playing the perfect gentleman, save for the intensity with which he handled a knife, his own admission that he’s “pathological,” and one slightly too-long look he gave her mid-hug.
Something isn’t right there. But they’re friends now, and when Paula needs help disposing of Dennis’s body — going to the police isn’t an option, not with her custody situation with ex-husband Karl hanging over her — she calls Steve. Which means she may have just recruited the head of the entire operation to help her bury the evidence, all while he’s hiding in plain sight as the nicest divorced dad on the sideline.
Of course, that’s the trap with a show this well-built — the second you’re sure Steve is the bad guy, you start wondering if that’s exactly what you’re supposed to think. Maybe he’s the boss. Maybe he’s just a genuinely nice guy and the real threat is still out there, watching Paula get cozy with the one person who might actually be safe. I literally have no idea, which makes for very intriguing television.
But it’s still not as good as Widow’s Bay.
