A highly addictive new thriller series has just been added to streaming

Holding an 85% Rotten Tomatoes score, the show is out today.

Accessible through Apple TV, the show follows Paula (Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black), a newly divorced mom who works as a fact-checker at a magazine. Lonely, she finds some form of solace by enlisting the services of Trevor (Brandon Flynn, 13 Reasons Why), an online sex worker or "camboy" who streams content and meets with clients virtually to fulfil their fantasies.

During one of these paid virtual sessions, Paula witnesses Trevor being attacked and dragged away off-screen.

The police (fronted by Triangle of Sadness' Dolly de Leon) don't take Paula's report of the assault seriously. They believe that Trevor may have staged the attack, intending to target the single mom at a later point with a ransom scam.

Unsure of this, Paula uses her fact-checking skills to begin her own investigation. In doing so, she falls into a dangerous rabbit hole of blackmail and murder, one which could unravel a greater conspiracy but may also threaten her ongoing custody battle.

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Review

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is worth seeking out for two main reasons: its contemporary spin on a classically compelling sub-genre and its fantastic cast.

The series is basically a supersized, slightly more comedic take on '70s and '80s paranoid thrillers like Blow Out, The Conversation, Marathon Man, The Parallax View, and The Days of the Condor, but for the modern age.

In those earlier movies, the protagonists stumbled into a wide-ranging conspiracy full of intrigue and suspense by venturing out of their homes and into the world. Thanks to the massive leap in technology and personal computers in the decades since, someone like Paula can be pulled into similar shadowy chaos without even leaving her home, the place where a person expects to be safest from harm.

Similarly, the lead characters in paranoid thrillers from the 1970s were often men without a lot of attachments. Paula is a single mother with a full-time job. She's organising school runs, managing her daughter's soccer team, and doing important work as a fact-checker for a magazine. She is also aiming for a promotion, so that a judge may look more favourably upon her in her custody battle with her ex-husband (Jake Johnson, New Girl).

Even without the crime element, watching Tatiana Maslany's Paula navigate all this would probably make for stressful, compulsive viewing. With the crime element, this sense of adrenaline increases tenfold as Paula's one means of release from these daily pressures - her virtual relationship with Trevor - is used as a weapon against her, creating several terrible knock-on effects.

She's ably supported by a typically affable and lovable Jake Johnson. He provides some huge laughs in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed as Paula's well-meaning ex-husband, who nevertheless often becomes a foil for her.

That said, the series is almost stolen entirely by Murray Bartlett (The White Lotus), cast against type in a villainous role. We won't reveal much about his character for fear of spoilers, except to say, imagine if Anton Chigurh took an acting class.

Like a lot of TV nowadays, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed feels a tad overstretched. Clocking in at 10 episodes, each in and around 35 minutes long, there probably could have been a tighter, more propulsive version of this if it lost some extraneous subplots and characters.

Yet, the series is still very addictive. The direction is stylish (David Gordon Green shot the pilot), the soundtrack suits the mood, the writing is witty, and when the violence comes, it hits hard. We'd watch season two in a heartbeat.

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Interviews

JOE caught up with the cast of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed ahead of the show's release, including Tatiana Maslany, Jake Johnson, and Murray Bartlett.

In the press notes for the series, Maslany said she responded to the show’s exploration of the pressures and judgment that come with being a working, single mother, explaining: “As a woman, age-wise, I relate to the idea of: ‘You’d better be perfect at everything!’”

Speaking to JOE, the actress also revealed she was intrigued by Paula's "sense of unpredictability".

"She has this feeling of being logical and knowing she has to be responsible and knowing what's right, but [she also has] the instinct to do the opposite and sort of follow a thread," Maslany explained.

"Part of the thing that she does when she's fact-checking is get to the truth of something or the fact behind something.

"But then also she does this in life [in how she handles the Trevor situation], and it's way more dangerous, and it's way more out of her depths. I think she has an irrational... gut instinct that sometimes leads her astray."

Jake Johnson, meanwhile, told JOE that it's rare to get scripts with such nuanced characters and dynamics as Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.

For instance, his character Karl and Karl's wife Mallory (Jessy Hodges, Barry), though foils to Paula, aren't really villains. The viewer always understands their perspective.

"It's really nice when there's a lot of grey area, and you're allowed to play characters as if they're real people as opposed to just playing a character that serves the scene or the protagonist," Johnson said.

On this, Hodges added: "The writing of the show is so spectacular. I think basically every character in this show feels complicated and dynamic and not easy to just put into one box, which is a huge achievement for a half-hour show."

Johnson also had a fun time filming the more overtly comic scenes in which Karl becomes flustered in a stressful situation and starts word vomiting.

"There was a scene in particular at the police station where Karl has a little bit of a panic attack, and that was a really nice mix [of writing and improvisation]," the actor recounted to JOE.

"A lot of it was written, but... [creator] David Rosen said: 'I'm looking for levity here. Let's have a little bit of fun.'

"It was the only scene in the show that felt like we were shooting more of a comedy, where we did a whole run of how people on fentanyl bend over. Then the director or David would come in and go: 'Maybe it's funny if you do this,' and I'd be like: 'Is that too broad?' And we'd be like: 'Let's try it.'

"That was the only one that we were playing for the comedy while trying to keep it as close to Karl as possible."

Murray Bartlett, meanwhile, told JOE he had "a ball" playing his villainous character.

"It feels different from what I've had the opportunity to play before, which was really exciting to me," he explained.

"I wanted to make it specific... So I started looking into what it was to be a sociopath because it seems like that's what this guy is.

"I researched that and did some deep dives and found some really helpful information that helped me navigate the way this guy goes through the world; being very strategic, lacking empathy, and being a sort of a shapeshifter in terms of observing human behaviour - not feeling how to do that naturally as a sociopath.

"[He's] able to see how people are in social situations and then act that out in different scenes... to get what he wants."

How to watch Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed

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Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed's first two episodes are streaming on Apple TV now. The rest of its 10-episode first season will be released weekly every Wednesday on the streaming service.

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