‘Widow’s Bay’ and ‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’ offer critique of inequality and skewed morals

Two television series offer, though in somewhat disguised form, a critique of contemporary global inequality and the skewed morals that accompany that imbalance. The two series, Widow’s Bay and Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, are both produced by Apple TV. Both illustrate what is possible to say in a highly controlled medium and, in their limitations, what is no longer possible to say or what is in the process on corporate media of being closed down at every moment. 

Apple, by the way, the only major media company not to sink its profits into AI, got off to a slow start with its “hits,” Severance, The Morning Show, hardly being that, and with some contemporary clinkers like Margo Has Money Problems. Severance, a favorite of bourgeois critics posed as a workplace critique while Apple Washing the company’s practices such as exploitative outsourcing while The Morning Show, though mildly excoriating daytime news shows for their blatant sexism ultimately found the good in their constant blathering and translating the news into flashy unentertaining entertainment. 

In these two recent outings, though, the company seems to have found a cagey way of lodging a critique. Widow’s Bay is a comic horror series set on a mythic island in the Northeast U.S. that the mayor (The Americans’ Matthew Rhys), the show’s focal point, wants to turn into the next Martha’s Vineyard. The problem is the island is haunted not only by its religious, misogynist, colonial past but also by serial killers in its less remote past. The residents, led by a salty ex-sea captain and a quirky mayoral aide—unpopular in high school and mocked because she survived a serial massacre—continually warn the mayor not to go ahead with his mass tourism project. He remains largely oblivious to their warnings until, slowly, episode by episode, he begins to acknowledge that not every island can be turned into a tourist paradise. 

It’s the same lesson Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are being taught by a mass movement of Albanian street protestors in their attempt to create a billionaire’s haven, which just happens to be also a strategic waterway connecting the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. The problem of mass tourism is also overwhelming Madrid, which Madrilenos are now desperately attempting to keep from being another Barcelona, yes, an international city but one that every day loses more and more of its authentic flavor. Or Bali, where new luxury hotels and condos every day eviscerate a unique and lively Hindu culture.

Rhys’ Mayor Tom, who attempts affability and frequently fails at it as he becomes more obsessed with transforming “his” island, is that frequent at least in series other than American ones, and particularly in Scandi-noir, villainous figure, the real estate developer here in a slight disguise as the mayor who supposedly just wants the best for his town. These are always figures of disgust in European series, attempting to corrupt the locals with their dreams of privileged expansion, akin to the evil figure in past Hollywood westerns of the railroad magnate who is about to pillage the town, supposedly in the name of progress but actually in the name of personal profit. It is ingenious to put a former villainous figure at the center of the series and have audiences rooting as much for as against him. 

On the one hand, it’s a sneaky way of validating progress for profit, in this case, the tourism industry dragging the town into the 21st century, but on the other, it’s a warning that the sanctity of place, even in this case, one with its rotten secrets, is not to be tampered with. The consequences are disastrous, as in the two-part finale, the tourists expecting a luxurious experience are instead trapped underground as the island rages against them in a storm outside, and as we watch, Cape Cod turns into Amityville. 

Just as penetrating in its own way is Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, where a superb Tatiana Maslany (from Orphan Black) is punished unceasingly for daring to want to have sex without guilt with a cam boy. What begins as physical pleasure without guilt quickly morphs into Paula being attacked, having to learn how to defend herself, and then being arrested for defending herself. There is an element here of the old American puritanical guilt, that any sex outside of marriage or hardcore commitment leads to disaster, but that is not the overriding point of the series. Paula is trapped in a conventional lifestyle. She loves her daughter, whom her former husband and his conniving partner are trying to wrest from her. She resists and flees the suburban corporate mom image, which will not hold for her. She refuses to go along as the window dressing to her husband’s boss’s party, where she is chastised for mispronouncing the name of one of the other Stepford wives as Kirsten rather than “Kiersten” while all the time wanting a more playful sex life that her husband is unable to offer. This is the “hysterical woman” of Freud’s Vienna of the early 20th century, here persecuted for stepping outside the rigid boundaries of a life that has seemingly changed little in over a century.

Her bucking that rigidity leads to potentially devastating consequences not just with her daughter but with the law. The other prominent point of the series is that Paula expects the people she encounters to be decent, but instead, what she meets everywhere are the ruthless but respectable denizens of a profit-driven society. These include: the male cop who determines her guilt mainly by her acting outside the norm; her ex’s partner who fixes the judge for their custody battle; and her co-worker who seemingly helps her only to betray her by using her plight to get ahead as a journalist complimented by her editor for being a “Machiavellian backstabber” and learning the lesson that “a real journalist has no friends.”

All this is initiated by the original transgression, the betrayal by the cam boy, because later she is told he saw her love for her daughter as an “exploitable weakness.” This series is far superior to Apple’s other series on the subject of monetary sexual liaisons, Margot Has Money Problems, where the usually reliable showrunner David E. Kelly succumbs to a cautious, pedantic examination of the subject. Maximum Pleasure is also extraordinarily well-written, with episode 6 paying off in a shocking and novel way Checkov’s dictum that a gun that appears in Act 1 must go off in Act V. And boy does it. 

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