LOS ANGELES — Tatiana Maslany is the best reason to watch “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” a new thriller premiering Wednesday on Apple TV, and since there is a lot of her in it, across 10 episodes, you can take that as a recommendation, of a sort.

Maslany plays Paula, a single mother, divorced and lonely. For some time, she has been spending time (and money) online with Trevor (Brandon Flynn), a “cam boy,” mostly for conversation, with a side of video sex. (I don’t know if it’s customary in these things for the caller to be on camera as well, but, significantly, Paula is.) It seems nice and friendly — a relationship. Then one day, as she watches, Trevor is attacked by a masked intruder who speaks a few words in a foreign tongue before the picture goes blank.

Det. Gonzales (Dolly De Leon) suggests it may be fake. That Paula may have been recorded. That blackmail could be in the offing. That she may get a call “like he’s in debt to some bad dudes or something like that and if he could get 10, maybe 20 grand, he can be free.” Which is what happens, and keeps happening, before it turns into a straight-out threat against Paula and her family.

Need I say that in the face of a slow police response — to be fair, she’s given them little to go on — Paula will turn into Nancy Drew, soon stumbling upon the first of the show’s dead bodies, and proceeding through a series of scrapes and skulkings, meanwhile trying to carve out time for her adorable young daughter, Hazel (Nola Wallace), whose soccer team she’s promised to co-coach, and navigating a time-consuming domestic drama with ex-husband Karl (Jake Johnson). (It’s a distraction for the viewer as well as for Paula.) Karl’s new wife, Mallory (Jessy Hodges), has been offered a dream job in Boise, Idaho, which brings up the question “What about Hazel?” No one thinks to ask Hazel.

Paula works as a fact-checker at a New York City newsmagazine, a job chosen, I imagine, to account for her investigatory chops, though not her tendency to put herself in dangerous situations. Almost nothing about the magazine scenes rings true either as a picture of publishing or, for that matter, working in an office. Her supercilious caricature of a boss, Suzie (Tara Summers), serves merely as a source of pressure. Colleagues Rudy (Charlie Hall), who is thinking about law school, and Geri (Kiarra Hamagami Goldberg), who wants to be a journalist, are there to eventually complete Paula’s Scooby gang and provide a hint of attraction masked by prickly banter, like Fred and Ginger before they get around to dancing. They go AWOL seemingly more or less at will in order to go sleuthing.

Creator David J. Rosen‘s premise is redolent of Hitchcock — an ordinary Jane thrust into intrigue, having to convince others she’s not mad — though what follows, being spread out among many episodes and side plots, dilutes the energy in a way the Master of Suspense surely would not have, even had he lived into this age of overlong streaming serials. A new character is introduced every so often to wake up the plot and complicate things; revelation follows revelation until revelation fatigue sets in, and the end we arrive at — the solution to the mystery — feels a little silly, out of proportion to the violent trouble it’s caused. (This may be the point, of course.) Evil, it’s banal.

Still, there’s much to enjoy. For every scene that feels false or unnecessary, there is one that works well; for every plot point that feels ticked off a checklist, something surprising pops up. Maslany is convincing both as victim and detective (though she makes a lot of bad decisions) and she and Wallace play well together; they are a most convincing mother and daughter. Though their characters blow hot and cold, her scenes with Johnson in which their latent friendliness comes through are a pleasure to watch. (Some care has been expended to demonstrate, and demonstrate again in case you missed it, that Karl is basically a good guy, a refreshing change from the typical blameworthy TV ex.)

While the quirks assigned to De Leon’s police detective (who gets her own bantering partner in Jon Michael Hill’s Det. Baxter), including a taste for gambling and cashews, feel tacked on, her performance is quite original, in its dry, droll way. Raymond Lee is underused as a friendly, flirty soccer dad. And Murray Bartlett, the doomed resort manager in the first season of “The White Lotus,” is here in a very different role, whose particulars I will not disclose.

Critically, we’re asked to rethink one character at a late date in a most unsatisfying way; I can see why Rosen has done it, in purely mechanical terms, but it’s out of key with what’s come before, and leaves us either with a hook to a second season or, barring that, a sort of horror-movie last stab. Well, you’ll see, if you see.

Because we live in a world in which privacy is obsolete, in which we’re spied upon routinely by devices recording our choices, our locations, our words, reading our mail and apparently our thoughts; and because anyone with a phone or computer knows what it’s like to receive an urgent message from a seemingly trustworthy source requiring immediate action to keep something bad from happening, there is something undeniably familiar and chilling in the setup, amplified by the continual ringing (or ring-toning) of a cellphone. You could call it relatable. And “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” does generate a good amount of tension on this point — there but for the click of a mouse go I.

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