Apple TV's 'Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed' Premieres Today — Murray Bartlett and Brandon Flynn Anchor a Cam-Boy Thriller With Real Queer Bones

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, the new Tatiana Maslany–led dark comedy from creator David J. Rosen, premieres on Apple TV today with its first two episodes. Weekly releases will roll out through July 15. The early reviews are mixed — Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, Collider, and Slant have all weighed in already, with takes ranging from “Maslany anchors an addictive tonal experiment” to “the show cannot decide what it is” — but the case for queer viewers to watch is more interesting than the case for general viewers, and worth laying out separately.

What the show is

The premise: a newly divorced soccer mom named Paula, played by Maslany, starts patronizing a cam performer named Trevor, played by Brandon Flynn. During one of their sessions, Paula watches an unknown assailant break into Trevor’s apartment and attack him. Trevor disappears. Paula — convinced the assault was real, less convinced anyone else will believe her — begins her own investigation, which spirals into a story about blackmail, youth soccer, a custody battle, and the limits of what a suburban mother is allowed to know about her own desires. Murray Bartlett, of Looking and The White Lotus, plays a key role in Paula’s orbit that the reviews have, to their credit, mostly avoided spoiling.

The show is a tonal mess on purpose. Slant called it “a hodgepodge sex thriller”; IndieWire called it “peppy”; Collider called it “unpredictable.” All three are accurate, and which of those three sounds appealing tells you whether you will like the show.

The queer talent and what they are doing with it

Two of the male leads are openly queer actors, and both are doing some of the most pointed work of their careers.

Brandon Flynn — who came out publicly in 2017 and has since spent most of his career in projects that take queerness seriously (13 Reasons Why, Looking for Alaska, the Hellraiser reboot) — plays Trevor as a working professional rather than a victim or a tragedy. The early episodes treat his cam work as a job. He is good at it. He has clients he likes and clients he tolerates. He has rent due. The show is not interested in pathologizing him, and Flynn plays him without the apologetic softness that screenwriters often default to when they want a sex worker character to be “sympathetic.” That is a small thing and a big thing at the same time. We have spent twenty years watching sex worker characters on prestige TV who exist either to be redeemed or to be killed; Flynn’s Trevor is allowed to just be a guy with a webcam and a problem.

Murray Bartlett, in the role we are not going to spoil, is doing the thing he does best, which is to play a character who appears to be one kind of person for thirty minutes and then becomes a different kind of person — without changing — by the end of the hour. His Armond in The White Lotus season one was the high-water mark for that move. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed gives him room to do a colder, more controlled version of it.

Maslany is the lead and the show belongs to her, but the more interesting structural choice is that the two openly queer male leads are written as people whose queerness is incidental rather than thematic. The show is about sex, money, and what suburban women are not allowed to want. It is not “about” the gayness of two of its leads. It just happens to cast its sex-work plot to gay actors who know what they are doing, and lets that work do its own job.

Where the show falters

The reviews that are mixed are mixed for the same reason: the show cannot quite decide whether it is a dark comedy with thriller bones or a thriller with comedy seasoning. The Hollywood Reporter’s review called the tonal balance “uncertain”; Slant’s was harsher, calling the suburban-mom satire and the missing-cam-boy mystery “two shows that have been stapled together.” Both reviews have a point. The first two episodes — which are what is dropping today — are stronger in the comedy register than in the thriller register, and the question of whether the back half of the season pulls the two strands together is, at this writing, an open one.

For queer viewers specifically, the show’s biggest risk is that the sex-work plot collapses into a more conventional “the cost of moral compromise” arc. The first two episodes do not show signs of this, but the genre’s gravitational pull is strong. We will be watching to see whether Trevor stays Trevor or becomes a metaphor.

Should you watch it

If you are looking for representation that is loud and explicit, this is not that. If you are looking for a show that quietly trusts its queer actors to do interesting work without underlining it, this is closer to the mark. If you are looking for a thriller that respects sex work as labor, the first two episodes are encouraging. If you are looking for a tightly plotted murder mystery, you will be frustrated by the third episode at the latest.

The show drops its first two episodes today on Apple TV, with new episodes weekly through July 15. We will write a fuller review when the season closes.