The most impressive thing about Tatiana Maslany's star-making work on Orphan Black wasn't that she was playing multiple characters in every episode, nor even that when she played one clone impersonating another, you could see the way she blended aspects of each performance. That was all incredible, absolutely. But the thing that ultimately wowed me the most about the sci-fi series was that the way she played each clone was so rich, so emotionally present, and so magnetic, that I would have watched a show that was only about any one of them, rather than this version where she was channeling four or more personae every week.
Maslany followed that tour de force with some fine work in other projects: intensely dramatic as a revivalist preacher in the first season of Perry Mason, and in appealing light comedy mode in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. But Apple's new dark comic thriller Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is the first TV vehicle she's had since Orphan Black that lets her unleash everything she can do — this time combining aspects of multiple clones into the same fascinating, fun character.
Alan Sepinwall
Maslany plays Paula, fact checker at The Margin, a New York-esque magazine with a surprisingly robust staff for 2026. She is recently-divorced from Karl (Jake Johnson), who is preparing to move from New York to Idaho with new wife Mallory (Jessy Hodges), and the exes are in a custody fight over grade school daughter Hazel (Nola Wallace). Paula loves taking care of Hazel, but she has no friends — fellow fact checkers Rudy (Charlie Hall) and Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg) are much younger and don't seem to like or understand her — and feels perpetually stressed at work. In need of some kind of emotional outlet, and also incredibly horny, she begins a virtual relationship with Trevor (Brandon Flynn) a camboy who's as empathetic as he is hot. When we meet Paula, she and Trevor are having a casual conversation about decorating her new apartment, the legal problems with Karl, etc., and she's so wrapped up in having a handsome man listen to her attentively that she has to pay to extend her session so they can get around to some video chat sex.