High Maintenance

High Maintenance is an American anthology comedy-drama television and web series created by ex-husband and wife team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. The show follows The Guy, a cannabis courier (played by Sinclair), as he delivers his product to clients in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Each episode focuses on different characters as their lives intersect with The Guy. The full series consists of six web series followed by four television seasons, released from November 2012 to April 2020. High Maintenance originally premiered as a web series on Vimeo on November 11, 2012, and began airing as a television series on HBO on September 16, 2016. The show's second HBO season premiered on January 19, 2018, and its third on January 20, 2019. HBO renewed the series for a fourth season, which premiered on February 7, 2020. On January 14, 2021, it was confirmed that the series would not return for a fifth season. High Maintenance has received critical acclaim for its portrayals of boredom, loneliness, and the human condition. First season episodes "Meth(od)" and "Grandpa" both placed on numerous year-end lists in 2016, while second season episode "Globo" was ranked as one of the best episodes of 2018 by sources such as Time and Variety. Structure Largely lacking serial plotlines, the show consists of vignettes in the lives of various New Yorkers as they come into direct or indirect contact with The Guy. The web series was shot throughout various neighborhoods in Brooklyn and occasionally Manhattan, and its episodes range from 5 to 20 minutes in length. "Freed of the constraints of thirty-minute or one-hour formulas, the episodes are luxurious and twisty and humane, radiating new ideas about storytelling," wrote television critic Emily Nussbaum in an article for The New Yorker.