The New Yorker recently had a story “Taster’s Choice” about the web series High Maintenance. The series stars the show’s co-creator Ben Sinclair as a nameless pot dealer. Each episode, which runs only around 6-15 minutes, features the dealer dropping off weed to a customer in New York. There is no ongoing storyline, and each episode is a complete short story on its own, featuring different characters getting a delivery by the dealer.
While the professionally made show is about a pot dealer, it is about more than marijuana. And while the shortness of each episode means we are not talking about War & Peace here, there is a completeness to each tale. So watching episodes becomes like sitting down with a bag of potato chips: Each bite is satisfying but also leading you to try one more.
Some episodes will make you laugh, and some are poignant slices of life, like the episode below that is entitled “Brad Pitts.” There is a sadness to the story but also something redeeming. Check it out. It only takes less than nine minutes.
High Maintenance // Brad Pitts from Janky Clown Productions on Vimeo.
Three episodes of High Maintenance are released every few months on Vimeo, where they stream for free. Although the episodes have been mostly funded by Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld (Sinclair’s wife and the show’s co-creator/co-writer/co-director/casting director), Vimeo plans to provide funding for upcoming shows. So it will be interesting to see what comes next for Sinclair, Blichfeld, and High Maintenance.
Thanks to Executive Producer Russell Gregory for a correction to an earlier version of this post. What do you think of High Maintenance? Leave your two cents in the comments.
