High Maintenance (2016)

An intimate show deeply curious about its characters that hits--apologies in advance for this--just the right high.

High Maintenance could easily have lost the transmutability that made it so special. Instead, it’s gotten better: The emotions run even deeper, the comedy is more self-aware, and The Guy’s ensemble of customers are more richly characterized.

A faceted little gem. It’s an evocative collection of vignettes about the dealer’s various customers, who live in the countless niches and experience the random events that define New York.

When it connects, it has the chance to hit back hard. It’s not something usually expected of any half-hour comedy, much less one whose conduit through each anthological arc is weed, but it is surprising in its readiness to be so darkly dramatic. ... High Maintenance is one of the best TV shows of 2016.

The common thread, of course, is the marijuana, which neither increases nor decreases the happiness in its users; it’s simply another form of brief release from the human condition, which High Maintenance portrays with subtly observed skill.

Despite his delivery route’s familiarity, The Guy still has plenty of tricks in his bag.

Lots of first-rate performances--including by a dog--but some of the stories are a little bloated or unfocused.

That’s part of the reason the show’s stories and characters feel honest and familiar; even if you don’t smoke, you probably know people who are just like The Guy’s customers. You may even recognize yourself in one of those people.

It makes a smooth transition to pay cable, one that retains all of the original’s charm and distinctiveness while adding some bigger-name stars into the series’ heady mix.

High Maintenance stands out, not just because it’s on the front end of what is apparently a reefer TV trend, but because it’s so precisely made and has such an ambling, open heart.

Wry, smart, culturally immediate, it takes great delight, on the one hand, in skewering that vaunted sociological/real-estate phenomenon one might call Insufferable Brooklyn. On the other, it consistently mines laughs and melancholy out of a smattering of sympathetic characters drawn from the ranks of the self-absorbed, the newly arrived, the mendacious and the medicated.

Even when the cut comes fast, they stay elegant; the images all register. We cut into conversations in the middle, suggesting talk that has been going on awhile and might go on longer. Scenes show as much as they need to, and just a little more, without seeming interrupted.

This is the same wry, peripatetic series at heart, a vision of urban life as a web of stories connected by wisps of smoke.

High Maintenance is impressively unruffled by its lengthened format or its move to HBO.

Some episodes are silly, others are sad. ... All of them are worth watching.

To Sinclair and Blichfeld’s credit, the HBO series presents its new season as one that can be appreciated by both first-time viewers and long-time fans. It builds on what’s happened before, but there are few inside jokes and veiled references--just the continued dedication to finding intimacy with these characters.

The real connection, as it were, among the six episodes is that they are all beautifully written, directed and performed. Taken either individually or together, they reflect aspects of contemporary life with care and attention to detail.

The caveat here is that for newcomers--and honestly that's really most people who will conceivably be sampling this--High Maintenance does not yet fully formed as a series. It feels like it's pulsating with creative potential, but if the series doesn't deliver beyond its already built-in cult, what it could have been will just be forgotten as some stoner's dream.