Making a Dark Comedy: The ‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’ Cast on Their Apple TV Hit
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The cast and creator of “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” a new darkly comedic thriller on Apple TV, recently sat down for a post-screening Q&A to discuss the show’s intense finale. Moderated by L.A. Times Senior Television Writer Yvonne Villarreal, the panel featured creator David J. Rosen alongside actors Jake Johnson, Jessy Hodges, Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg and Charlie Hall.
“Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” follows Paula, a newly divorced mom played by Tatiana Maslany, who falls down a dangerous rabbit hole of blackmail, murder and youth soccer. Caught in the middle of a custody battle and a full-blown identity crisis, she starts investigating a possible crime on her own and ends up uncovering a larger conspiracy that may also help her rebuild her family.
In Apple TV’s new thriller series, the actor plays a lonely divorced single mother who gets wrapped up in a murder mystery while trying to navigate her personal life.
David Rosen, creator, EP and writer, traced the show’s origins back to something a lot less dramatic than blackmail and murder: loneliness. “I really was thinking a lot, not exactly off the log line, but I was thinking a lot about how apparently we’re living in an epidemic of loneliness,” he said, describing a Paula-type character going online for a bit of companionship and stumbling into “a classic Hitchcock and ‘Rear Window’ type of situation.”
From there, the panel dug into the finale’s custody ruling, which didn’t go the way Jake Johnson expected when he first read the script. He admitted being surprised Karl lost but landed on it making sense anyway. “I know y’all don’t like him, but I thought that was a good move for the child,” Johnson said, getting a laugh out of the room, partly because his mom was sitting in the audience.
Hall got into the physical comedy behind one of Rudy’s stranger moments this season, the scene where he gets hit in the head with a bong. He walked through the logic of playing a guy who’s clearly high before a masked intruder shows up in his apartment, then landed on the simplest possible summary of the whole bit, “It was fun to play dazed and confused … and getting hit in the head with a bong is special stuff.”
Tatiana Maslany and Jake Johnson spoke about their new dark comedy thriller series on Apple TV and what they would do in a scenario where they are being scammed.
Later, when the conversation turned to Maslany, both Johnson and Hodges talked about how differently the actress approaches a scene each time it’s shot. Johnson described watching her work across dozens of takes and somehow making it all land in the edit: “You go like, oh, she cuts together like butter. You’re like, oh, smooth.”
Rosen also touched on how tricky it was to blend the show’s comedy with heavier material like loneliness, desperation and identity, saying the team decided early on to “write a thriller that worked as a thriller” and then populate it with characters who happen to be funny, rather than building jokes around the plot. He confirmed he’s already been thinking about where a second season could go and hinted that what happened in Portland “had to mean more than what it meant” – with plenty left to unpack if the show gets picked up again.
“Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” is streaming now on Apple TV.
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