The new season of “High Maintenance” opens with a modern moment of dread. In an episode called “Globo,” a Brooklyn pot dealer—a character we know only as the Guy—wakes up with his girlfriend. The two are cozy and slovenly, joking about the ethics of sharing dreams. Then they check their phones. Something awful has happened: a terrorist event, the details left vague. “I think I’m going to go to work early,” the Guy says, staring at his screen. “Yeah,” she says. “That makes sense.”
“Globo” lasts just twenty-six minutes. And yet, somehow, in its spiky, elliptical, warmly observant way, as the camera floats without judgment from one thread to another, from bistro to crash pad to brownstone stoop—sometimes following the Guy as he delivers weed to customers, but just as often not—it manages to suggest an entire city looking for comfort. A fat man struggles to maintain his workout regimen, but each time he tries to post his progress on Facebook he sees someone grieving and deletes the draft. A woman and two bros hook up at the McCarren Hotel, a decadent bubble far from the headlines. An exhausted immigrant waiter takes a long subway ride. Each plot gets an O. Henry twist, one funny, one filthy, one sweet. It never feels contrived, because the stories seem spontaneous, as natural as a train of thought. It’s a remarkable achievement of narrative efficiency, fuelled by humility.
That’s long been the gift of this unusual series, which débuted, in 2012, on Vimeo. The Web version of “High Maintenance” was the self-funded creation of a married couple: the grizzled, bug-eyed Ben Sinclair, who plays the Guy, and who until this show had mostly done cameos as homeless guys; and his then wife, Katja Blichfeld, a casting director with a Rolodex full of similarly underused talents. For viewers accustomed to the rigid rules of TV formula, those early seasons felt visionary. Some episodes were just eight minutes long. Others were nearly silent, or spliced from tiny edits into montages. The series managed to be poetic without being pretentious—and although it was funny, it wasn’t quite stoner humor. The visual trumped the verbal. Every episode told a new story.
After nineteen episodes, the series shifted to HBO. The transition was bumpy. You could see the money gleaming, heavily, on the screen. Episodes were longer; the pacing dragged. There were still several gems, particularly “Grandpa,” a joyful episode from the P.O.V. of a dog, and the lovely “Tick,” which combined two stories about eccentric parents. But the tone was uneven. Sinclair has said that, when he and Blichfeld ended things romantically, their series began to dwell on people extricating themselves from relationships. For whatever reason, a tinge of sourness—or self-loathing, or at least self-consciousness—had harshed the show’s trademark mellow.
This new abrasiveness led to some daring experiments, like a story in which a gay man and his female friend degenerate from codependence into rank pathology. But other scenarios were clunky, and, in a few cases, shadowed by something like white guilt. The show’s early focus had been on a small slice of Brooklyn—a creative-class demographic adjacent to that of “Girls,” which is to say, people who use drugs without fear of the cops. Over time, the lens widened, but the results could be stagy, sometimes literally so, as in a sequence in which a crude, trash-talking black bodybuilder turns out to be a British Method actor. The frame distracted from the picture.
In the show’s second season on HBO, airing this month, the ease is back, thank God, and the series feels, even in slighter moments, newly confident, with an increased ability to reflect a larger world in flux. Each of the five episodes sent to critics is worth watching. In one, Danielle Brooks (Taystee, on “Orange Is the New Black”) plays an African-American real-estate agent hoping to cash in on a changing Bed-Stuy. In another, two artists (John E. Peery and Candace Thompson) win a low-income-housing lottery and move into a Greenpoint co-op, only to discover that the amenities—a roof deck, a sauna—are available only to rich tenants. One screwball sequence takes place in Bushwick, where a feminist resistance group bubbles with racial anxiety, to the point that a white member sneaks off to the kitchen and, going through her Instagram contacts, begins panic-inviting women of color. Miraculously, none of these stories feel preachy—and often they kink into a joke, or a surreal image, or some other unusual narrative swerve. One episode has a snake that wriggles from one plot over into another. Two have fart jokes.
The show has always had a native sympathy for tricksters and hustlers, and, almost by definition, it’s down to party. More recently, Sinclair and Blichfeld have shown a willingness to dwell on more uncomfortable aspects of its subject matter, too, especially in a dreamy episode in which the Guy lands in the E.R., sneaking tokes when the nurses look away. The story includes a rare scene that actually qualifies as stoner humor: just two people, getting high, killing time, giggling at jokes that make sense only to them. But it somehow manages to find the “High Maintenance” sweet spot anyway, emphasizing the way isolation and intimacy can overlap. It doesn’t judge. But it doesn’t look away.
In the five years since “High Maintenance” first aired, the anthology model has taken off, especially on streaming and cable. It lets creators mess around, and frees viewers from the binge-watch. Still, the genre is not a guaranteed good time. Since 2011, Charlie Brooker has produced the digital dystopia “Black Mirror,” but his fourth season, on Netflix, is atypically spotty. (The “USS Callister” and “Hang the DJ” episodes work best.) Other anthologies include “Electric Dreams,” a Philip K. Dick adaptation, on Amazon; the affably odd “Room 104,” by the Duplass Brothers, on HBO; and “Easy,” on Netflix, now in Season 2. The genre’s influence is apparent elsewhere, too: one of the three good episodes in Season 2 of “Master of None” was a “High Maintenance” ripoff (or homage, if you want to be nice).
Of this cadre, the most interesting is “Easy,” because it’s terrible. By rights, the show should be a Midwestern twin of “High Maintenance.” It’s another portrait of a city: Chicago. The creator, Joe Swanberg, is an entrepreneurial upstart, whose specialty is mumbly domesticity. And the series uses superficially similar techniques, all glimpses and epiphanies and montages and gazes and tinkly music and improvisational dialogue, with the occasional dark comic twist. It also benefits from a remarkable cast, giving performances so strong that they elevate weak material. (Believe me, it is hard to pan a show that includes both Jane Adams, as Marc Maron’s soft-hearted feminist crony, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.)
Yet “Easy” stumbles, again and again. It’s smug where “High Maintenance” is humble. It’s formless where “High Maintenance” is graceful. It’s twee instead of funny, with a misplaced confidence that all human behavior is worth watching. When a moral theme bubbles up—a frequent occurrence for such a chill, indie show—it’s pedantic. In the worst stories, like a truly irksome doubleheader about artisanal breweries, the characters resemble the “Portlandia” ensemble, minus the satire. But even the best are full of passionate banality. A three-day babysitting montage is sweet, then, finally, so idyllic that it verges on propaganda for egg-freezing. A feminist writer/sex worker has some fun, gonzo sex scenes, but her story goes nowhere, making her seem less like a person than like a set of talking points in lingerie. The standout first-season episode “Art and Life” is rude, well-plotted, and genuinely sexy. Over time, however, even the nudity gets old, with conventional guy-gaze voyeurism re-branded as liberatory hipness.
On “High Maintenance,” by contrast, the most alarmingly graphic sex scene has a purpose: it tests the viewer and sets up a reveal. As in the short stories of Grace Paley, the plotlessness is, finally, a higher form of rigor, at once a philosophy and a misdirect. In “Derech,” one of the best new episodes, Anja, a writer for Vice, manipulates her way into a support group for former Orthodox Jews. The story feels as though it’s about exploitation—until suddenly one plot collides with another, in which glitter-caked drag queens primp for a rave. There’s a shocking, nearly violent climax. But there’s also time along the way for a sing-along with lyrics about the actress Elisabeth Shue. As ever on the show, these detours aren’t delays. You just don’t know where you’re going until you get there. ♦