The fantastic web series High Maintenance is more than worth your time — it’s even worth investing a few bucks.
The Guy (Ben Sinclair) with customer Evan Waxman (Avery Monsen) in Episode 2 of Season 5 of High Maintenance, "Genghis."
Janky Clown Productions
The scruffily affable hero of High Maintenance, simply credited as the Guy, is a drug dealer.
More specifically, he delivers weed, sold by the eighth. He travels by bike, by subway, and by foot, and he sticks to Brooklyn unless there's a very good reason to make an exception. The service he provides is not unique to New York, but it's one that speaks to a particular quirk of the city, which is packed with a hundred museums, bars, galleries, restaurants, and unique sights, but which also seems intent on making it as easy as possible to just stay home in your (probably tiny) apartment and have everything brought to your doorstep.
It also means that the Guy (Ben Sinclair) spends most of his time dipping in and out of the lives and living situations of his varied customers. That's the basic conceit of High Maintenance, a web series created by Sinclair and his wife Katja Blichfeld, which has just debuted three of its first-ever pay episodes on Vimeo On Demand. It's the streaming site's first venture into original programming. The Guy stops by a different household each episode to drop off some pot and, sometimes, to hang out.
It sounds like a wacky stoner sketch comedy, but High Maintenance is much, much more than that. Though the desire to get baked is an essential part of each episode, it's often just tangential to a larger, sometimes funny, and sometimes achingly poignant snapshot of urban existence. It's a show that's filled with dead-on microdetails about the particular slice of New York life each installment zeroes in on (In "Geiger," the first of the new episodes, one of the Fort Greene buppies mutters, "I'm going to download the Wine Spectator app," after shooing away what he saw as a condescending offer of help from clerk at the store). But there's no in-jokiness or sense of eliteness to its specificity, which is all about quickly transforming its characters from types to quirky, unpredictable, all too believable people.
Tanisha Long and William Jackson Harper in "Geiger"
Janky Clown Productions
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