High Maintenance


High Maintenance is an American anthology comedy-drama television and web series created by ex-husband and wife team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. The show follows The Guy, a cannabis courier, as he delivers his product to clients in New York City. Each episode focuses on different characters as their lives intersect with The Guy.
High Maintenance originally premiered as a web series on Vimeo on November 11, 2012, and began airing as a television series on HBO on September 16, 2016. The show's second HBO season premiered on January 19, 2018, and its third on January 20, 2019. HBO renewed the series for a fourth season, which premiered on February 7, 2020.
High Maintenance has received critical acclaim for its portrayals of boredom, loneliness, and the human condition. First season episodes "Meth and "Grandpa" both placed on numerous year-end lists in 2016, while second season episode "Globo" was ranked as one of the best episodes of 2018 by sources such as Time and Variety.

Plot

Largely plotless, the show consists of vignettes in the lives of various New Yorkers as they come into direct or indirect contact with The Guy. The web series was shot throughout various neighborhoods in Brooklyn and occasionally Manhattan, and its episodes range from 5 to 20 minutes in length. The television version continued the practice of on-location photography. "Freed of the constraints of thirty-minute or one-hour formulas, the episodes are luxurious and twisty and humane, radiating new ideas about storytelling," wrote television critic Emily Nussbaum in an article for The New Yorker.
When the series moved to HBO, its episodes expanded to the half-hour format.

Episodes

Production

Sinclair said that the TV shows Six Feet Under and Party Down were inspirations for the web series.
The talent pool in New York City is rich—and familiar to Blichfeld. Each episode cost less than $1,000 to make.
In June 2014, Vimeo announced that the website would provide financial backing for upcoming episodes of original programming via their Vimeo on Demand platform.
Vimeo funded six episodes of High Maintenance before the series was picked up by HBO. Three episodes were released November 11, 2014, and the remaining three on February 5, 2015.

Critical response

Critical response has been positive. The actor Dan Stevens, who later appeared on the show, calls it "a brilliant collection of succinct character portraits from a cross-section of New York society." Jenji Kohan said that High Maintenance was one of her favorite recent discoveries, calling the episodes little jewels, "beautiful glimpses into people's lives," "really well crafted," "delicious."
The Guy often interacts with members of the Jewish community in the areas of New York that he services, and he himself is Jewish. This aspect of the series has been noted approvingly by Jewish reviewers for its representation of contemporary Jewish life. Ethnic diversity in the show as it moved from web series to an HBO series has also been noted.

Notable cast