The Real-Life High Times of ‘High Maintenance’
What if the weed delivery dude was always showing up when you were in the midst of a personal crisis? So it goes in High Maintenance, a remarkably well-crafted series of 10 Web comedy shorts about an unnamed bike-riding dealer – “the guy” – who heroically offers herbal relief to stressed-out New Yorkers. “The weed delivery guy is the only stranger you let inside your home,” says Ben Sinclair, who plays “the guy” and writes, directs and produces the series with his wife, Katja Blichfeld, an Emmy-nominated casting agent. “You let him in because you really need to relax. In a way, the show is about the depression that hums in the background of your life, and how people treat it with weed.”
Weed Issue: Rolling Stone‘s Special Coverage on Marijuana in America
Except for an unfinished screenplay by Sinclair, neither had done much writing previously, but the couple found easy inspiration in their own lives. “There’s something inside me that says, ‘Being stoned all the time is not a good thing,'” says Sinclair. “I try to treat weed as a spice. Then again, I put sriracha on everything, so who knows?”
This story is from the June 20th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.