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SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Queens,” the Season 1 finale of “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” now streaming on Apple TV.
At the moment we think that Paula Saunders has finally gotten her life together,
things get sent reeling once more.
Over the course of the first season of Apple TV’s “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” Paula (Tatiana Maslany) has juggled several huge challenges. After watching Trevor (Brandon Flynn), a webcam sex worker she was paying, seemingly get murdered onscreen, Paula has attempted to solve the crime — and to get free from the web of blackmailers making her life hell. In the midst of all this, too, she’s been trying to keep custody of her daughter Hazel (Nola Wallace) even as her ex Karl and his new wife Mallory (Jake Johnson and Jessy Hodges) want to move the family to Boise.
As the season comes in for a landing, all seems solved! Paula wins her custody hearing, despite her erratic behavior lately, and the danger she’s endured has faded into the rear view. Shadowy crime-world figures, the same ones, seemingly, who’ve been running the entire web of miscreance into which Paula has plunged, force Frank (Murray Bartlett), Paula’s main antagonist, off a roof with a fake suicide note admitting to Trevor’s killing, all loose ends seem tied up. Detective Sofia Gonzalez (Dolly de Leon) believes there’s more to the story, but Paula, free from suspicion and ready to move on, doesn’t care. “I don’t know anything that makes any sense!,” Paula tells Detective Gonzalez, closing the door on her involvement in the police investigation. She goes on to say that she’s going to celebrate her victories, and even go on a date (she’s been circling Steve, a fellow parent played by Raymond Lee.) “I’m dropping everything else, and maybe you should too.”
Too bad for her, then, that, once Hazel is in bed, Paula receives a video from her time living in Portland. Back then, as we know, Paula killed a neighbor in a seeming accident, running over Caleb (David Garelick) with her car when driving Hazel home one night. The video, sent to her from an unknown number, shows that Paula seemed entirely aware of what she was doing. As Caleb stood in front of the car, yelling at Paula in personal terms (including, intriguingly, telling her “I vouched for you”), Paula removes her foot from the brake and then accelerates into him. The blackmailers — whoever they are, and we now know that they don’t include Frank — have, now, information that could ruin Paula’s life. And they know it. “We own you,” they text. “You’re gonna do us a favor.” The season ends with her phone ringing, with whatever extortionate demand to be made of Paula waiting for a future season.
Variety spoke to David J. Rosen, the series’ creator, about the finale and the season as a whole. “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” began with a relatively simple crime, but expanded boundlessly outward into a conspiracy thriller — but, as Rosen makes clear, its success lies in the simple humanity of Paula, who ultimately just wants to do a decent job as a mom. And for all the zaniness of the crimes, Rosen, aided by the Emmy-winning Maslany, felt he needed to get the emotional texture of Paula’s custody journey right. (When I mentioned that I’m married to an attorney who works in New York family court, Rosen asked whether he found the custody story credible.)
While the show’s renewal hasn’t yet to be announced, but there are many loose threads for Rosen to pick up in a potential Season 2, including the future of Paula’s young colleagues Rudy (Charlie Hall) and Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg), whose feints toward a romantic relationship fizzle in the finale. Most of all, the finale did in miniature what the season has done throughout — pull the rug out from under Paula, and from under the viewers, by presenting a set of facts, and then revealing just how much more lies underneath.
As the episode ends, we learn that the nefarious person or people blackmailing Paula have footage of the car accident, and that she seems more at fault than we’d realized. What was the thinking behind hiding this information up until the finale?
I always intended it to be a reframing. We’ve felt Paula is a reliable narrator, but we feel moments of unreliability. As Karl says over and over, she’s eccentric, acting in a way that’s not consistent. The audience is like, Screw you, Karl! She’s going through a lot right now! But what we come to realize in the end is that something more was afoot. Paula is more complicated than we thought.
Paula, at the beginning of this series, is reaching out, in this epidemic of loneliness that we’re living in, for a tiny bit of happiness. It launches her into this modern-day “Rear Window” through her computer. But what we realize at the end of it all is that it wasn’t just Poor Paula, look what’s happened to you — she is complicit, a little bit, in her own undoing.
Did you anticipate some blowback from viewers? The audience has been rooting for her, and we suddenly realize that the fissures in her personality may go deeper than we’d realized.
I personally don’t see it that way. We’re all more complex than what we put out there, and I don’t think we know, essentially, what went on in Portland. That remains to be discovered. We’re being given the footage that is out there, but we need to understand more about the story. We’ve seen her drive home, but we don’t know what’s happened in the days and weeks prior.
We’ve gotten the sense that Caleb is pestering her, and Paula’s reaction to him suggests, too, that Caleb makes her feel unsafe.
I believe we can agree that there is some sort of past between them. We don’t know what the relationship is based on. We don’t know what the anger is about. I look at it like when you’re on Reddit and you’re like, That neighbor is such an asshole — she deserved everything that came to her. Then some comment buried way down is like, If you read the whole story, she’s been pushed to the brink for years by this other person.
How did Paula grow or change as the season went on?
There’s an arc for her, and it’s not something the character realizes; when we’re on journeys, we don’t really know we’re on the journey until we get to the end. I look at that moment where she steps in and kisses Steve in Episode 10 — I don’t know if she has the confidence to do that if she doesn’t go on this journey. I don’t know that she stands up for herself in the courtroom if she doesn’t go on this journey. The worst thing that’s ever happened to her has forced her to be the bravest she’s ever been. I don’t think she would do it all over again for the growth that she’s getting, but she is getting growth.
There’s a pleasure in the fact that the previously underutilized skills she’s discovering are directly related to the work she does as a magazine fact checker.
Not to glaze your profession, as the kids say, but that she’s a fact checker has always been really important to me. We live in a time where suddenly, the truth is subjective — Hey, we both have our truth. No, we don’t. There’s a truth. For Paula, her whole life now depends on being better, and more strict to the facts even than she is at work.
Speaking of Paula’s workplace, I was really rooting for Rudy and Geri to get together — and I felt certain that they would in the finale. You really subverted my expectations!
There was debate among the writers. But my feeling was that to put them together in the finale would feel very “TV.” What felt more real to that time of life, at least for me, was that it’s a very high-risk, high-reward friendship-to-relationship situation. At that age, timing is huge. There are people that would be great together, but they’re ships in the night. If they are to end up together, it couldn’t be as simple as this.
[When Rudy tells Geri he’s back with his ex,] I don’t know whether or not Rudy and Vi are actually back together, or whether he, in the moment, was like, “Oh my God, there’s so much pressure.” That’s an answer that I look forward to getting into.
I thought it was really interesting that Paula retains custody after all that she’s been through. Does this mean that the idea of Karl moving their daughter to Boise is a totally dead topic?
I don’t think Boise is dead; I think Boise is out there. Karl and Mallory have a lot to work out right now, and, weirdly, the weight that’s been on Paula’s shoulders — how are you going to live your life if you lose custody? — has now completely shifted onto them. There’s that scene toward the end of the finale where she throws his words from the pilot back in his face: “I guess you’ve got to tighten your shit up, Karl.” It’s a delicious moment for her as a character, because she’s like, fucking finally, it’s not on me.
Speaking of that moment, I just want to shout out how incredible Tatiana was in that courtroom scene.
Seconded. What’s really impressive to me is the way she conveyed that, in the midst of the craziest time of Paula’s life, being a parent is truly important to her. People are chasing her, but she still needs to get snacks for soccer practice. That scene hit so hard for me because we’re realizing that if she’s not able to be a parent, the rest of her exploits don’t matter.
I feel like this show has given the character some small victories along the way, but not a ton of “the underdog wins” moments. The catharsis is all about the fact that she gets to keep Hazel — that’s the North star. So there was a lot of pressure to pull it off.
I imagine you felt in good hands with Tatiana Maslany, because the situations are, in the best sense, outlandish. If you don’t have an actor who can keep the story feeling grounded, it could kind of end up in outer space.
She’s incredible at that. Once she was cast, the relief I felt. When you’re making a comic thriller, it’s very fraught, because if the balance isn’t right, you’re like, Oh, I’m not really worried about those people. It’s just a not-that-great thriller. Once we cast Tatiana, I knew that the goal was to write this as the best thriller we can make, and she’s going to ground it all. She’s funny, and we will populate it with characters who can be funny, but we don’t have to write funny. We can just let her do her thing. She is one of those rare actors that you’ll follow anywhere. The character can make bad choices, and you still love them for it.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
