‘High Maintenance’ Makes Me Want to Be a Better New Yorker

It’s April 20th, which means, yes, 4/20, the ONE DAY A YEAR that people smoke pot! Isn’t it fantastic?! How we abstain all year and then have this one day to toke up like some real potheads? Anyway, if you’re looking for thematic entertainment, one of the first shows you’re going to want to hit up is likely HBO’s acclaimed High Maintenance. But whereas most stoner entertainment invites a comfy, slouchy, couch-bound kind of revelry, High Maintenance does something different, to me at least. There is no show airing on TV today that makes me want to be a better human being, and specifically a better New Yorker. It’s perhaps the most counterintuitive thing on television today. An HBO show about the misadventures of a weed dealer in New York City, entering the lives of the casual pot smoker and dedicated stoner alike, in a series of interconnected vignettes that end up creating a patchwork across the city (okay, mostly Brooklyn), which puts the viewer (specifically me) in a strangely motivated mindset. This weed dealer traverses more of this big, beautiful city, and meets more of its quirky, specific, fascinating residents, in ten short half-hours, than I have in a decade. It’s humbling and inspiring all at once.

High Maintenance, which premiered as a web series on Vimeo in 2012 and was picked up to series by HBO in 2016, follows Ben Sinclair (series co-creator, with Katja Blichfield) as a weed dealer known only as The Guy. Noncommittal but amiable, The Guy makes his deliveries, and as he does, he momentarily drifts into the lives of these people. Professionals, artists, outcasts, parents, introverts; there is no real defining category that encompasses all of The Guy’s customers, and that is precisely the point. Every week, he’s meeting new people, with fascinating, sometimes mundane, lives. Diverse worldviews and experiences abound. Some are people you wouldn’t want to be around for much longer than the fifteen or so minutes The Guy spends with them; others you want to hang with for longer. Nearly every time, though, you come away with the impression that The Guy is better off for meeting and interacting with them.

The irony of High Maintenance is that he’s the delivery guy, the most transient of professions, but he’s always eager to make these brief connections with people. And New York City, with hundreds of thousands scuttling around in their own lives, becomes something much different for The Guy than it is for a lot of us who experience it every day. For us, New York can become an exercise in getting through it. You develop strategies for your commute, for grocery shopping, for laundry, for spending time with friends, for seeing movies and theater and art, and most of those strategies involve getting through the city with as little friction from other human beings as possible. High Maintenance is about living in that friction. It’s about the fact that New York offers art and theater and food and culture, yes, but it also offers a limitless supply of other people’s lives and experiences, which all have the potential to enrich and challenge and entertain. This, of course, isn’t exclusive to New York, even though High Maintenance does a stunningly good job at evoking the many specificities of this city. But I know people get angry when films and TV shows romanticize New York as if no other cities offer what it offers. (And they don’t, not entirely, but we don’t have to dwell on that now!)

The second season premiere episode of High Maintenance stands out because it breaks from the format a little bit. We’re slowly clued in to the fact that something has happened in the world. It’s not quite a 9/11-level attack, it’s not quite the Trump election, it’s both these things, and it’s none. The point is that it affects everybody and rocks them all in very specific ways. The Guy rides his bike through his day like he’s canvassing a blast zone, and perhaps for once, he’s not peddling the kind of comfort people need. By the end of the episode, in a scene that walks right up to the line of too-hokey, gathered, silent strangers on the subway come together momentarily as a kid bats a balloon around. It’s genuinely one of the most lovely moments on television all year, and more than anything else, it made me think I shouldn’t have my headphones on so often when I leave my apartment. I should be open to these small, meaningful interactions with strangers.

And then there’s the season 1 finale, “Ex,” where The Guy makes a delivery to one of his regulars, a La Croix-obsessed shut-in, Patrick (played by the wonderful Michael Cyril Creighton), who’s grieving the recent death of his mother. It turns out, Patrick doesn’t really smoke. He just appreciates the company. The Guy encourages Patrick to give it a try, but not for another afternoon wallowing in his apartment. So Patrick gets high, puts on some headphones (making me feel better about my own personal choices), and then just wanders the city. He really takes it in, the city blocks and the bustling humanity. He interacts with some strangers. He is, perhaps for the first time, a living, breathing part of the organism that is New York City. And watching that from my own comfy couch, I feel genuinely inspired. This is exactly what I should be doing. That on this 4/20, rather than getting high and vegging out, I’m going to get high and venture out.

You know, in a minute or two.

Where to stream High Maintenance