It is not often that I get to be a bit ahead of the game with stuff, but in the case of High Maintenance I cannot resist the urge to snobbishly point out that, of course, I was watching this when it was a webseries on Vimeo. I mention this for two reasons; the first is to deflate myself by pointing out that loads of people were – which is why it did so well and got picked up by HBO, but the other reason is to offset some of the comparisons that I will not be able to resist making.
Regardless of the platform, the idea is the same here, which is that we connect with characters around New York through their interaction/connection/proximity to a cycle drug dealer (who remains nameless as with the webseries – just 'The Guy'). This format generally means we mostly have two characters, or sets of characters, per episode – usually with a connection of some sort between those two. This format continues to work because it opens to the door to a wide variety of characters. It is a fair complaint however that the show is very heavily slanted towards a modern liberal view of the world, with graphic male nudity and characters from all walks of life except those that a cis white male such as myself may consider "normal". Myself I wondered if this bothered me, and when it did a little bit, I wondered why. I am not sure why – mainly because it never bothered me with the webseries, so why did it even hit a little bit as an issue here?
Part of it was not really down to the diversity of the characters (which is not an issue, and reflects pot users in a diverse city such as New York), but more to do with the way that the HBO show falls a little short of where the Vimeo one was. This area is that of character, because I did not think that the show drew me into the people as well as the Vimeo episodes had at their best. Sometimes this is because the 2-character structure limits time to flesh them out; other times it feels like the push to be counter-culture does more to make it about the lifestyle than the person, and in some case it is that the character is not that well developed (10-15 minutes to see an Instagram narcissist who cries when alone at night?). The only episode given over to one character is that of a dog, and that stands out as the best as it gives us the space to feel for the character, and understand them rather than just seeing them as 'what' they are. The other episodes are still good, but they do not get away from the 'what' as well as I would have liked.
Production values remain very high of course, and the performances are all good across the season. The show remains engaging in its diversity and honesty; there are plenty of good characters and also throwbacks an meta jokes in here for previous viewers, and in all the episodes I really appreciated that it did retain that heart of the original – I just wished it had done it more, and pushed to find the people within the scenarios on a more consistent basis. Very much enjoyed this first season though, and hope that now it is bedded in and has its second season coming, that it will push more to match what it did so well in its later Vimeo cycles.
