“High Maintenance” has a wide ambit, and its vignette-based structure provides it the freedom to depict New York more accurately and fully than anything that has come before it. It’s a formula that has won it near-universal praise from TV critics, who admire the show for its roving empathy and nonjudgmental gaze. Here the city contains its multitudes: It’s a place rich with living history and lousy with self-centered 26-year-olds; a gentrified husk of its former self and yet still the promised land for countless newcomers from near and far; lonely and cacophonous, utterly predictable and endlessly surprising. But the show’s sharp eye for sociological detail and obsessive dedication to realism exist in tension with these moments of ostentatious surprise.
What makes “High Maintenance” so intelligent is that it also documents the widespread isolation and alienation that make the fantasy so seductive.
Isolation perfumes the show, and this is the thing about “High Maintenance,” with its obsessive verisimilitude, that actually feels the most accurate.
Any TV show that has produced as many episodes as High Maintenance risks falling into these types of prescribed formulas and narrative shortcuts, even if it’s not calculated on the writers’ part. And one way to break out of this mold is to examine the process itself, either by foregrounding it or unpacking its execution, which is whatHigh Maintenancedid with last week’s premiere of the show’s fourth season on HBO.
“We look for stories with characters and scenes and a story arc, and so do they,” Glass explains. “It seemed like their basic mission was in the general neighborhood that we were in, even though they’re using the tools of fiction and we’re using the tools of fact.”
Both shows hew to an anthology format and share a comparable humanist outlook, two qualities that facilitate a sense of durability, but also the potential to conform to
“It has to keep reinventing itself,” Sinclair insists. “It has to be the same and a little bit different. We want to progress, but we also don’t want to be tied to this as our only mode of expression. We also have to let go and let things pass, and know that it will reincarnate later, to not grasp onto this show too tightly, to kind of let it go through us. We have to let things die and compost and give life to something else.”
