Tatiana Maslany Stars in the New 'Comedic Thriller' 'Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed'—Get an Exclusive First Look

Lauren Puckett-PopeMon, April 6, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC

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Your First Look at Maximum Pleasure GuaranteedZach Dilgard

Tatiana Maslany as Paula Sanders in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.Zach Dilgard

The sun is arcing high over the Broadway Stages in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where Tatiana Maslany throws herself onto a couch and groans into the nearest pillow. Someone I can’t see—director David Gordon Green, I presume—shouts “cut,” but the actress’s face remains temporarily fixed in its frown, her curls falling past her forehead and into her eyes. As the character Paula Sanders—fact-checker, mom, divorcée, youth soccer coach, and inadvertent criminal investigator—her morning is not going particularly smoothly.

It’s October 2025, a few days before Halloween, and Maslany is filming a scene from one of the final episodes of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a new Apple TV series billed as a “darkly comedic thriller” from creator and showrunner David J. Rosen (Hunters, Sugar) and director Green (the Halloween remakes, Eastbound & Down, The Righteous Gemstones). The project is moving quickly: Production launched in Brooklyn in early August, and by November, filming will have wrapped. A mere handful of months later, the show will roll out the first two of its 10 episodes on May 20, 2026.

Surrounded by the trappings of Paula’s domestic life—the framed photos of her daughter, Hazel, in her soccer uniform; the parking tickets stuck to the fridge with magnets; the couch and chairs upholstered in comforting shades of beiges, greens, and blues—Maslany really does look like she lives here. I arrived on set earlier in the morning, and when I walked in, Maslany was perched in a plastic chair outside the stage entrance, as if lounging on the front porch of her own home. When the Orphan Black and She-Hulk actress officially signed on to Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed in February 2025, her performance as Paula became the anchor for the entire series.

The story follows the recent divorcée as she becomes entangled with a camboy, Trevor (Brandon Flynn). When Trevor attempts to scam Paula, his efforts result in a murder, which itself results in a criminal investigation led by Detective Sofia Gonzalez (Dolly de Leon) and her partner, Detective Baxter (Jon Michael Hill). Sofia isn’t certain she can trust Paula, whose mysterious past in Portland is opaque at best, and whose new life in New York seems to be falling to pieces around her: Paula is navigating a custody battle with her ex-husband, Karl (Jake Johnson), and Karl’s new wife, Mallory (Jessy Hodges), while trying to hold down her job at Margin, where her coworkers in the fact-checking department—Rudi (Charlie Hall) and Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg)—have become a little too curious about her camboy friend.

“All of the things that [Paula] knew about herself have shifted, or have been taken away, or have changed completely,” Maslany tells me over Zoom a few days after my visit to set. She’s bent over a laptop in her trailer, inadvertently mirroring Paula herself, who first encounters Trevor through a computer screen. “She’s recently divorced; she’s fighting for custody of her kid,” Maslany continues. “She’s involved in a relationship with a camboy who’s her confidant and her [source of] intimacy. And that gets compromised, too.”

Murray Bartlett as Dennis in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.Zach Dilgard

All these moving pieces orbit Paula as well as her daughter, Hazel (Nola Wallace), who—bless her—just wants to wear her favorite pink cleats to soccer practice. As Paula’s inquiries into Trevor’s background pull her into the crosshairs of Trevor’s older boyfriend, Dennis (Murray Bartlett), the tone of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed veers from heartfelt to hilarious to pulse-pounding.

“I’ve done things that have had a thriller-y feel to them, and I’ve done things that have a comedic feel, but there’s something about this blending that’s really interesting to me,” Maslany says. That blending extends to the casting itself, she argues: Each actor has “a real comedy prowess and dexterity, but they also are exploring other shades of themselves and their artistry.” Johnson’s role, for example, “doesn’t have bits or jokes in it,” even though he’s known for his work in comedies like New Girl, and Hodges “could make you laugh in a heartbeat, but she breaks your heart in this.” Maslany concludes, “It really feels like play. All of the takes are different. I have no idea what’s going to end up in the show. [That’s] the best part of it.”

Green, who previously directed Maslany in the 2017 biopic Stronger, first received the scripts for Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed from writer-creator Rosen in early 2025, he tells me. Mere months later, he was in New York, behind the camera, having been immediately drawn in by the aforementioned tone of Rosen’s storytelling, which Green labels as “psychological with wit.”

“You can fall into the traps of formulas really quick,” Green says. “Particularly in television, but in movies too—[the traps] of expectations, of audience demands. With Rosen and myself and our team of misfit conspirators, there’s enough rascal in us to want to push buttons, right?”

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He continues, “This is the third series I’ve done with Apple [TV], and as an underdog in some creative capacities, they’re looking to surprise people, show them something new, and bring people like us on board to break the formats—to find those secret recipes of things that other people didn’t see coming.”

The result is a not-quite-half-hour series that moves through its episodes at a steady, addicting clip, led by an unexpected-but-well-suited ensemble telling an unorthodox but meaningful story.

Jon Michael Hill as Detective Baxter and Dolly De Leon as Detective Sofia Gonzalez in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.Zach Dilgard

“We take the thriller part of it extremely seriously, and the comedy comes from the characters,” says Rosen, who first started writing a pilot script for the series back in 2021. “Just like in regular life, there’s a lot of really serious situations [the characters] are in, but when you’re with your friends, generally someone says something funny in those moments. So that’s what we tried to create here: What’s happening feels real and scary and dangerous, but the people involved are normal, regular people. No one has any superpowers, and therefore there is some comedy and some tears and those things that come with being human.”

Johnson found that Rosen and Green’s precise-but-playful approach to the series allowed for the cast’s performances to evolve “organically,” he says. “David [Green] is perfect because he knows exactly what he likes. And when [the scene] changes a little bit, if it’s working, he’s happy. [Showrunner] Liz Meriwether was like that with New Girl, where she knew exactly what she liked, but if you’re adding something and it’s right? Great. I have realized, over the years, not everybody’s like that.”

When I meet with Hall, Goldberg, and Hodges that same morning in Greenpoint, they each struggle to articulate exactly what it is that makes Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed feel like such a rare project—and yet they each gush about the…well, pleasure of that rarity. “I’ve always done things that fit cleanly into a bucket,” Hall says. “I’ve either done things that are straight horror, straight drama, or straight comedy. And this gives you everything.”

Adds Goldberg, “I read the pilot in one sitting, very quickly. I laughed; I gasped at the end.” Her character, Geri, and Hall’s character, Rudi, serve as confidants to Paula and, later, her loyal co-investigators. (That loyalty continues even when their investigation grows bloody. When an actor I won’t identify—lest I share spoilers—walks into the room to chat with me, they’re sporting a fake wound near their temple.) “This is my first [time as a] series regular and first time being a part of a project from, really, beginning to end,” Goldberg says, “and getting to do it with people who are so good at what they do, but also really nice humans, is such a treat.”

Hodges similarly shares many of her scenes with Maslany as their characters duke it out over Hazel’s custody. Mallory wants to move the family to Boise, Idaho; Paula thinks that’s a preposterous idea. “What I was so excited about with this [series]—and what kind of jumped off the page pretty quickly—is that Mallory’s not just the other woman,” Hodges says. “It’s not just, like, Tatiana’s good, I’m bad, Jake’s whatever. Everybody feels layered and dimensional.”

Director David Gordon hopes Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed “starts turning heads” and sparks conversations.Apple TV

Rosen, who considers the series one of “the highlights of my career” so far, feels that “we’ve all, as a team, done our best to put something out there.” With that in mind, Green shares that he hopes Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed will sit somewhere among “the Baby Reindeers and the Adolescences” of the Hollywood landscape—“shows that start to build and grow both in curiosity and conversation” as word of mouth spreads.

“This isn’t the type of show that comes in with a commanding marquee, where everyone tunes in out of the gate,” he says. “This is something that is conversational and starts turning heads. I like the more intellectual underdog of where we are. I think that’s really valuable, something that’s not just an ‘overnight, in-and-out, done,’ but a ‘let’s see where this goes.’ And we’ll be there with our wicked wit and insight as people start asking questions—and, hopefully, wanting more.”

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”