In the span of a few years, Apple has established itself as a destination for quality streaming TV. Series like Ted Lasso, Severance, and Widow’s Bay have broken into the larger zeitgeist to become bonafide hits. Now, the streamer has decided the fate of one of its newer offerings, a thriller that seemed to offer up a new twist in every episode.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed stars Tatiana Maslany as Paula Sanders, a divorced fact-checker who’s turned to internet sex workers for solace. Unfortunately, those dalliances soon turn her life upside down when she gets entangled in a blackmail scheme that threatens to destroy her life. Making matters worse, she gets embroiled in a custody battle with her ex-husband, Karl (Jake Johnson) and his new wife, Mallory (Jessy Hodges), who want to move to Idaho and take Karl and Paula’s daughter, Hazel (Nola Wallace) with them.
Now, a second season of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed has been guaranteed. The series has been renewed by Apple TV, three months after the show’s finale ended on a shocking cliffhanger. Says showrunner David J. Rosen, “We are delighted to continue the story of MPG and deeply grateful to Apple and our incredible cast and crew. This is all pretty amazing for a show whose title came from a spam email.” The series was a hit with critics, earning a 93% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In her review, Collider’s Emily Bernard praised the series as “a solid, addictive addition to the streamer.”
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Coen Brothers Movie Would You Thrive In? Lebowski · O Brother · Fargo · No Country
Nobody writes people like the Coen brothers. The decent ones. The talkers. The ones who stopped trying years ago. And the ones who can already see how bad this is going to get. Four films, four completely different ways of handling trouble. Eight questions decide which one you would actually walk out of.
🎳Lebowski(1998)
🎸O Brother(2000)
❄️Fargo(1996)
🪙No Country(2007)
01
A bag of money lands in your lap. What happens next? Every Coen film starts roughly here. It never goes smoothly.
02
Somebody is being completely unreasonable with you. How does it go? Coen dialogue is mostly people failing to understand each other.
03
What is your actual relationship with work? Everyone in these films is either working far too hard or not at all.
04
Long drive, bad weather, nobody else on the road. How are you? There is always a drive in these films. It is never a good drive.
05
You are offered a shortcut that is not quite legal. This is the moment where the Coens find out who you really are.
06
The plan has fallen apart completely. What is your move? In a Coen film the plan always falls apart. That is the genre.
07
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Nobody writes a line quite like the Coens. Which one is yours?
08
How does your film end? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your movie.
The Verdict Is In Your Coen Film Is…
Four films, four completely different ways of handling money, trouble
and other people. This is the one you would survive, why it suits you, and what it would cost you to
be there.
The Big Lebowski · 1998
The Big Lebowski
You have quietly arranged your life so that very little can get
to you, and a surprising number of people find that infuriating. You would be completely at
home here.
The Dude is the only person in the film with no ambition, and the only one who comes out
the other side undamaged. That is not an accident.
You do not chase things. You let situations arrive and you deal with them at your own
pace, which is a genuine skill however lazy it looks.
This is a full crime plot happening around a man who mostly wants his rug back, and that
is exactly the energy you would bring to it.
Everything goes wrong. You abide. The film ends.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? · 2000
O Brother
You talk your way through life and it works far more often than
it should. Give you a bad situation and an audience and you will find a way out of both at
once.
Everett never has a plan that survives contact with reality. He has something better,
which is the ability to keep talking until a new one turns up.
You are the optimist in the group, the one who makes a ridiculous idea sound reasonable
at two in the morning.
This is the warmest film the Coens have made. It is a chase, a comedy and a musical at
once, and nobody in it is quite beyond saving.
You would end up famous entirely by accident, and act like you planned it all along.
Fargo · 1996
Fargo
You would survive Fargo because you are the only kind of person
who does: patient, decent, and completely unimpressed by anybody trying to be clever.
Marge Gunderson solves the whole case by being polite, thorough and unhurried while
everybody around her panics. That is the entire argument of the film.
You do the boring parts of the job, which is precisely why you would notice the thing
everyone else walked straight past.
Fargo is about ordinary greed causing enormous damage, and about one person who simply
refuses to be corrupted by any of it.
You would go home at the end of it, have dinner, and sleep perfectly well.
No Country for Old Men · 2007
No Country
You do not expect the world to be fair and you stopped being
surprised about it a long time ago. That clear-eyed quality is exactly what this film asks
for.
No Country is the Coens at their coldest: a film where being smart, fast and careful
might still not be anywhere near enough.
You plan for the worst, you keep your own counsel, and some part of you is already
working out the exit.
Llewelyn Moss is competent, prepared and resourceful, and the film is honest about
whether any of that is ever sufficient.
You would see it coming. Whether that helps is the one question the film refuses to
answer.
What Happened in the Season 1 Finale of ‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’?
With the help of her colleagues, Rusy (Charlie Hall) and Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg), Paula uncovers that the plot to blackmail her was a mere appendix to a massive nationwide blackmail scheme with sinister corporate backing. When she confronts them, the scheme’s corporate backers arrange for the deaths of Paula’s blackmailers. That gets her out of the legal trouble she was in, and wins her custody of Hazel. However, her troubles are only just beginning. Earlier in the season, we saw that Paula ran down her neighbor Caleb two years earlier, an incident that led to the breakup of her marriage with Karl. Now, the blackmailers have surveillance of the deadly incident, and have made Paula know that they now own her.
Season 2 of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is in development; no release date has yet been announced. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.
