High Maintenance

[Prettyphile]

The Guy is a nameless marijuana dealer in Brooklyn who delivers his goods to stressed-out clients across New York City, who have a variety of neuroses. While delivering the weed to his customers, he makes brief appearances in their lives to get a glimpse at their daily routines. Among the folks he encounters are Max, who must maintain a charade to remain part of a new group of friends, and Jim, a retiree who lives downstairs from his neurotic daughter and her family. The comedy series stars Ben Sinclair, who created the show with wife Katja Blichfeld, as The Guy.

Network: HBO

 

 

Quote

New York City, as it’s often portrayed on television, is the worst. It’s certainly not real.

It’s typically more glamorous, or dingier, or more unfriendly, or more magical, or too busy, or implausibly convenient, or a million other things that fail to represent what the city actually is: a place where real people live.

High Maintenance might finally be a TV show that presents New York City in a way that seems actually recognizable.

And not in a “the city is the fifth girl in this friendship!” way, where New York is a “character.” It’s simply a backdrop for the lives of the people we meet every day, oh-so fleetingly, and looks the way it does when we see it in our own lives. It’s a stage of sorts for the theatre of human life that’s constantly in rehearsal—but without the falseness of set dressings or an artistic lens. It’s the city as we know it.

That’s the greatest triumph for HBO’s new series, which knits together a tapestry of New Yorkers’ wild lives as a weed delivery man briefly encounters them. And that presents the most unlikely triumph of High Maintenance, which is that it is a series that uses drugs as its narrative connective tissue, but in which drug use or “stoner comedy” tropes are the least interesting or even the least important parts of the show.

As The Daily Beast wrote when covering an earlier iteration of the show as a web series in 2014, “Marijuana is a supporting character at best, treated no less innocuously than wine or Thai takeout, and taking a back seat to far more compelling and crippling vices.”

As codependent roommates manipulatively sabotage each other’s lives, a swingers’ party devolves into arguments about betrayal, and a Muslim NYU student is confronted for her cavalier rebelliousness, the weed is often just the device through which we’re granted entrance into these people’s lives.

Few shows pull off a feeling quite as voyeuristic as High Maintenance manages, appeasing our perverse desires to be granted intimate access to strangers’ lives. “What’s their deal?” “What’s their story?” “What’s going on behind closed doors?” High Maintenance opens those doors, revealing the sometimes thrilling, sometimes sexy, sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes odd, and always insightful stories already in progress behind them.

 

 

[Prettyphile]

@Stormbringer  I just watched the first episode and I love it! Like Turn levels of love.

[Prettyphile]

High Maintenance: HBO's Potent New Comedy Delivers More Than Laughs
With a runtime of 33 minutes, HBO’s High Maintenance premiere is roughly four times longer than any of the episodes in the web series from which it spawned — and we’re happy to report that it’s time well spent.
Unlike the webseries, which focused on one customer per episode, HBO sends the show’s leading man — an unnamed pot dealer played by Ben Sinclair, who also writes and directs the episodes with Katja Blichfeld — on multiple deliveries, as seen in Friday’s “series” premiere.

As always, the episode introduced us to the guy’s customers via little vignettes of their day-to-day lives before throwing him into the mix. And as always, his clients have a penchant for being the absolute worst. First up was a Vin Diesel wannabe named Johnny who collects samurai swords and offers unsolicited exercise advice, though it was Johnny’s attempt to pay his $200 free in coins(!) that finally sent the guy running. (It’s a shame, too. If he’d stuck around for a few more minutes, he might have learned that “Johnny” is actually a British actor attempting to live in a new character. Maybe next time.)
But it was the second half of Friday’s premiere that’s bound to leave a more lasting impression — and not just because of that surprisingly graphic sex scene between returning-character Max (Max Jenkins) and real-life gay porn star Colby Keller. Tired of living under the oppressive thumb of his best “friend,” a vapid garbage human, Max found solace in attending 12-step meetings, pretending that his emotionally abusive friendship was actually an addiction to crystal meth.

Despite the inherent reprehension of someone lying about having an addiction, it was hard not to feel for Max in his darkest hour, as he finally accepted that he couldn’t continue living that way. Things only got worse when his roommate exposed his lies — mid-meeting in front of all his new “friends,” mind you — thus sending him on a downward spiral that ended with him actually doing crystal meth for the first time. (I’m trying to figure out what’s more of a bitch, Max’s post-meth comedown, or his roommate, who managed to suck him back into her dark void under the guise of nursing him back to health.)

[Stormbringer]

On 18/9/2016 at 2:06 AM, Prettyphile said:

@Stormbringer  I just watched the first episode and I love it! Like Turn levels of love.

 

I don't know if I can keep up with more TV shows