When you don’t have a job, you’re always working. Or at least this is one way to understand High Maintenance, which first aired as an independently produced web series on Vimeo from 2012–2015 and then as an HBO-produced TV comedy from 2016 to the present (its fourth season just finished airing). The show’s plot is simple. An unnamed weed (and occasional shroom) dealer (Ben Sinclair) delivers weed (and occasionally shrooms). Beyond that, each episode follows segments of the lives of his various customers, offering almost journalistic slice-of-life views of the most intimate parts of New York (one recent episode even takes place in NPR’s studios and features guest star Ira Glass playing himself).
The Guy—this is the only name we receive for the show’s protagonist—effortlessly moves through each of these scenes, no matter how bizarre. Even in his anonymity, he’s not without a personality. He’s friendly, cracks good jokes, and always remembers what’s been going on in his customers’ lives. He gets along with their pets, sometimes their kids, and he’ll eat whatever they’ve baked recently (he never forgets to compliment it, either). This geniality is eased along by his anonymity. The show suggests that just because you can’t stop working, it doesn’t mean you have to be a dick about it. In fact, it’s probably more fun that way.
The genre of the anthology series—wherein each episode tells a different story, unrelated or loosely related to other episodes—works analogously to the anonymous, non-committal labor the show dramatizes. Each episode remains segmented and self-sufficient, just like the relationships, stories, and lives that populate the show’s vision of New York City. While one episode ends in tragedy or heartbreak, another can just as readily vault into comic success or exuberant self-discovery. The show depicts a world in which nobody’s trajectory has to be the same as anyone else’s. While this is partly the fantasy (and the lie) sold by New York City, the anthology genre manages or, to take a word from the show’s title, maintains the necessary separation to allow everyone who lives in New York City to imagine their story is theirs and theirs alone. In the same way that another anthology show like The Twilight Zone (1959–1964) sets up a new absurd horror with each episode, High Maintenance uses generic conventions to start each episode in a different place of the same scenario—but here, the absurd horror is neoliberal capitalism.
Seriality becomes a stand-in for sociality in this vision of the world. The Guy is conveniently detached, or perhaps detachable is more accurate. Whereas he knows everything about his customers—their relationships, problems, anxieties, and hopes—they never have to know anything about him. But it’s not entirely clear who’s exploiting whom in this situation. This is partly because the show indexes a present shift in the way that labor maintenance and exploitation are occurring. As David Harvey notes, there is currently a collapse in the distinction between self-exploitation (say, a restaurant owner who exploits his own labor) and exploitation (say, the owner exploiting the labor of a chef), distinctions that are becoming indistinguishable across various kinds of informal labor, such as The Guy’s dealing. Even though The Guy employs nobody (the show provides brief glimpses of friends and lovers who help out), his labor is still intertwined with that of his customers.
In addition to the weed that he sells, the show dramatizes how The Guy hocks the service of affectively maintaining his customers’ ability to participate in their own atomized relations of labor and exploitation. These are all too often unmanageable: people work more hours than are in the day, their bosses demand the impossible, and they’re paid next to nothing to boot. In a world where workers are employed to do more labor than should be manageable, The Guy’s work seems to be less about dealing weed and more about taking up the affective excess this overwork generates and converting it into a calm, sedated—high—relaxation. Even with The Guy’s weed, this life mired in excessive labor is untenable. But the show never has to stick with these characters for as long as they have to work their jobs; instead it divides lives into glimpses. The show’s anthologized segments and serialized episodes dissipate this excess, like smoke from a joint, into the weeklong gaps (the show airs on Sunday nights, so these gaps are literally the viewers’ real-life workweek) between episodes.
The fact that we never see where this excess, or perhaps surplus, labor and value go is partly the point. The show has understood this from its very first episode, when it was produced as a series of shorts on Vimeo. The pilot “Stevie” shows The Guy delivering weed to a hotel where he finds an anxious personal assistant (Bridget Moloney) to an unnamed celebrity who never appears in the episode. “Sorry. I have to text her back right away or she gets really mad,” she monologues: “Right now, she’s like ‘Are you getting these texts?’ And it’s like, ‘Yes, of course I’m here. I’m texting you back. Who else would be texting you, you crazy bitch?’” The cell phone tether at once highlights the role of digital communication in easing this new phase of capitalist exploitation, but its buzzing presence in the scene acts as an inconvenient, distracting prop. The phone at once, then, appears as the management of labor but also signals the breakdown of any narrative depiction of that labor. Labor has increased to the point where nobody’s doing work, they’re just texting their boss about how they’re texting them. But even as this work becomes increasingly turned in on itself, there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. Signaling that the boss is herself consumed by this work, the assistant asks, “Who else would be texting you?”
As he’s about to leave, the assistant’s phone buzzes yet again, The Guy jokes: “You gonna get that?” The show cuts to them both in the bathroom, high, eating junk food and drawing on the chalkboard walls of this quirky, bougie hotel. They are finally having what seems to be a real connection as mutually overwhelmed human beings. When the phone buzzes again, she impulsively throws it into the hotel toilet, pauses, and says, “I just did that.” They high five. The plot’s comic resolution glosses over the fact that nothing has really changed. While it’s satisfying to destroy the phone that enables her boss’s overmanagement, there hangs over the scene a specter of authority that always looms offscreen, even as The Guy and his customer carve out a space of stoned immediacy together.
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Micah Hauser’s review on LARB glosses the show by noting that “Life is still high maintenance, but it’s nice to know you aren’t alone.” The show places faith in these moments of togetherness, as characters cross paths and, however briefly, have something resembling a connection. Although High Maintenance is billed as a comedy, The Guy’s comfortable presence leaves space for other characters to share their stress, their discomfort, and their lives’ unbearableness. When the show made the transition from Vimeo to HBO this became increasingly apparent, as segments heightened the drama and overtly “political” (in the HBO sense of the word) aspects of the show’s content.
High Maintenance addresses the racialized inequality embedded in both the drug economy and its prosecution, but with its own ironic bent. In one episode, “Selfie,” an Instagram-obsessed NYU grad named Anja (Ismenia Mendes), trying to make it as a blogger/writer/social media presence, convinces The Guy to let her interview him (the idea came from a Sex and the City episode). The interview lurches from incompetent to uncomfortable, as she first asks, “So, you’re a pot dealer. What’s that like?” Then, shortly, “Have you ever been arrested?” And when he says, confused, no: “Do you feel like maybe that’s because you’re white?” It’s not just uncomfortable because she, a young white woman who has been mainly characterized in this segment by her class background, has inopportunely mentioned race but because she blunders through it, seemingly not caring about the racialized war on drugs but having been told by someone on Twitter that she probably should care about it. She gaspingly reaches to justify her sudden turn in questions: “Well, it’s just that a disproportionate amount of people in prison for marijuana offenses are non-white, and I thought you might have something to say about that.” When she leaves the room to answer a call from a wealthy connection her mother has introduced her to, The Guy sees that she’s posted a picture of him on Instagram (despite his telling her not to, for obvious reasons). He packs up, tells her to erase the photo, and leaves. The show cuts to her in bed, not quite reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, and sobbing, as the camera slowly zooms in. Her sobbing gets increasingly loud, as the segment ends and the show moves on to another character’s story.
Addressing racialized persecution and mass incarceration as a half-baked idea taken up by a rich NYU grad seems at best like an equally half-baked critique of online social justice. But here the show stages two understandings of what The Guy’s job really is. To Anja, he’s a weed dealer, imbricated in the systems of racialized persecution and exploitation that come with that business. His job, actually, is not to sell you weed, but to keep your mind off capitalist exploitation and the fact that, even as much as you hate your job or your life, someone else has it even worse off than you. This becomes more apparent at the end of the segment, when it tempers the hatred and contempt we have been developing for Anja. Depicting her sobbing in bed, High Maintenance illustrates that she too is overwhelmed by the state of the world, and her interview attempt, however misguided and naïve, was one way to at least feel like she was doing something about it.
The show offers a different image of collectivity in its second season opener “Globo,” which depicts New York City stirring in the wake of an unnamed catastrophe that is constantly hinted as the 2016 presidential election. In a city that needs a narcotic numbness—within a minute it’s described as both a “phantasmagoria of despair” and “kind of like a post-9/11 vibe”—The Guy does an incredible day of business. He ends the episode hanging out in a bar with an Australian bartender (Yael Stone) he’s sleeping with—she’s also made a ton in tips—where they chat with Luiz (Ivan Camilo), a barback who is shown working multiple jobs throughout the episode. The show then leaves the drug dealers, bartenders, and other panicked folks as Luiz exhaustedly rides the subway to go pick up his son Luca from a friend’s home. The whole way, he carries a pink balloon. As Luiz and Luca ride the subway somewhere else in the middle of the night, Luca lets the balloon drift throughout the subway car, and tired passengers gently hit it back and forth as Luiz says, “Bye, globo.” Luiz and Luca cuddle and laugh on the nearly empty subway, and everyone—from the couple on their way home from date night to the construction workers after a long shift—finally, briefly feels okay within the broken and fucked-up world they have all mutually created together.
The balloon, the globo, is the heartbreaking center of the scene. It’s all too literally empty (or filled with helium, which has itself somehow become the object of political worry in recent years), but it also provides its consolation, which the show tries to capture as it cuts to yet another credit sequence. While it simultaneously depicts and distracts from the inequality that undergirds life in a stratified city like New York, the show repeatedly brings us back to these images of vacuity: a pink balloon or a thoughtless interview or a bong. In lending so much credence to these sources of comfort and hope, the show depicts the emotional solidity with which we lean on the emptiest of things.
New York City (and increasingly every other major city) is undergoing a labor crisis, as rents rise, infrastructure fails, pandemics shut down the city, and those who can get a job have to work increasingly greater hours to get by. High Maintenance gives viewers glimpses of this crisis, but only in brief segments, so that the extent of this immiseration constantly escapes its plot. Instead, we see various coping mechanisms (weed, balloons, that one interview that will make you Joan Didion) as empty but material traces of the embedded inequality and lack of support that structures the world. High Maintenance relies generically and formally on these ephemeral, fleeting vignettes because it’s within these short scenes that vacuity can feel like enough. Weed isn’t about the literal drug (this is something that Anja’s fumbling interview misunderstands), it’s about finding a coping mechanism, an attachment, or some hope in a world that consistently denies any solid support for these things. When all that’s solid melts into smoke, sometimes an empty balloon is all you have left.
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The show’s fourth and most recent season insists that these moments of brokenness, pain, and hope are inseparable. The episode “Trick” mirrors two scenes of commodified affective labor. First rendition: an attractive, tall black gay man, Matthew (Calvin Leon Smith), lets The Guy into his stylish Brooklyn apartment where art and photographs adorn the walls. The Guy immediately asks, “Can I use the bathroom?” Then they do the deal with a bit of small chat, while the Guy’s dog pees on one of Matthew’s nice rugs. Apologizing profusely, The Guy hands him back a couple bills: “Here’s a tiny refund.” Matthew cleans up the mess, tidies his apartment, and then smokes some weed and relaxes until there’s another buzz at his door.
Second rendition: Matthew lets a slightly younger black man, Travis (Jay Jurden), into his apartment, who similarly asks right away, “Could I use your bathroom?” As they awkwardly chat, it’s gradually revealed that he met Travis through an anonymous sex work service they both call “The Site” (get it?). “I like how you said you do the boyfriend experience,” Matthew says, and they gradually, fumblingly, tenderly find themselves in bed together. The show suggests that this sex worker’s charm is something like The Guy’s, as Travis handles interactions with adorable awkwardness, genial discomfort, and a sort of friendly commitment to whatever it is his role is supposed to be. “Want me to fuck you, baby?” he says intensely, going slightly too fast, performing someone else’s fantasy in a way that the show’s comic atmosphere buoys comfortably into tenderness as they cuddle instead. Then Travis confesses: “I’m kind of new at this.” He cracks jokes until they do have sex and then—the purpose of his labor finally completed—Travis leaves. When Matthew goes back out to his kitchen, he sees that there’s another “tiny refund.” Travis left a couple bills on the counter, reversing the typical exchange in this transaction. Matthew picks them up, smiles and laughs slightly, before the show cuts to yet another scene in New York
In this mirroring, High Maintenance extrapolates from The Guy’s repeated maintenance of others’ problems, showing a world in which these affective, exploitative relations are generalized, replicable, and common. In other words, it depicts this type of labor not as the exception but as the rule structuring this lifeworld. In this reality, it’s hard to know what to make of the bills Travis left on the counter. Perhaps they’re another image of optimistic emptiness. Matthew didn’t want or ask for this refund. The bills on the counter hold open a promise that this interaction was not merely transactional but that there was a real connection, something more than paying for sex. More than just “the boyfriend experience” but an actual, if however temporary, boyfriend. The show never reveals what happens afterward (later in the episode, we see Travis waiting tables), if this actually was something. Rather, in mirroring The Guy’s weed deal with the scene of sex work, High Maintenance suggests that it’s precisely this ambiguity—the thing that, by remaining ambiguous, never reveals that it could be vacuous—that makes life bearable in New York City, in a life where you’re never not working. Sure, it could mean nothing, but why not pretend otherwise?