The Story Behind the Web’s Buzziest Weed Series ‘High Maintenance’
When Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld set out to make High Maintenance, their Web series about a weed delivery guy in New York City, they had one important goal.
“We didn’t want to become some ‘stoner’ show,” says Blichfeld, a former casting director on 30 Rock. “We don’t really know that [particular] brand of stoner portrayed in movies. The people we know who identify as stoners are actually some of the most productive, successful, creative people we know. High Maintenance looks like the world we live in.”
Having debuted in 2012, the show plays like finely drawn vignettes of urban life in among the not-always upwardly mobile. Each installment follows a largely new set of characters that all have one thing in common with folks from the previous episodes: the same scraggly, warm-hearted weed deliveryman, known only as “the Guy,” and played by Sinclair.
The pair first began conceptualizing High Maintenance a few months after they got married in 2010. They originally figured each episode shouldn’t run longer than five minutes because, as Sinclair puts it, “The assumption with the Internet is that people don’t want to give you their time because they’ve got other stuff to do.” But after the first few episodes, fans were craving more. “They were saying, ‘The show is addictive.’ The biggest critique [we got] is that it’s not enough.” Gradually, the episodes have gotten longer — one stretches to nearly 19 minutes — and more emotionally complex, introducing characters struggling with cancer, PTSD, loneliness and sexual identity.