Upon first description, the premise of Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair’s High Maintenance — an episodic web series concerning the various encounters of a bicycle-bound New York weed dealer — sounds like the surefire set-up for a lighthearted sitcom with room for a plethora of jokes about cannabis and Manhattanites. However, while there is plenty of room for weed jokes and gentle New Yorkisms in their series, the finished product is a far more subtle, poignant, and literary experience than one might expect. With each episode a free-standing vignette centered around a different character, all united by the common thread of visits from a nameless weed dealer (titled “The Guy” and played by Sinclair himself), High Maintenance plays like a long-form video collection of short stories, with subject matter including bird-watching, obsession, asexuality, self-improvement, cross-dressing, and end-of-world paranoia. The episodes are sometimes funny and sometimes tragic, but always told through Blichfeld and Sinclair’s pointed, casual, and occasionally absurdist voice.
In November, the series’ fifth season began on Vimeo, now financially backed by the website as part of its first foray into Netflix-style original content. The first three episodes of the season — “Geiger,” “Genghis,” and “Ruth” — continue in the show’s multifaceted, unpredictable mélange of stories, tones, emotions, and characters. The season will conclude February 5 with three new episodes, “Esme,” “Sufjan,” and “Sabrina.”
Blichfeld and Sinclair discussed their filmmaking roots and the show’s ongoing evolution with Tiny Mix Tapes.
…So I’m in an area that a train occasionally passes through, so if it sounds like I’m exploding at any point in time on this end of the line, that’s what’s happening.
Katja Blichfeld: Where are you?
Well… I’m at my mom’s house.
KB: Where is it?
Next to the train tracks in Menlo Park, out here in sunny California.
KB: Oh, Menlo Park. Gotcha.
Ben Sinclair: Thomas Edison was from Menlo Park, no?
Uh, I think he was from the Menlo Park in New Jersey.
BS: Oh, fuck. I fucked it up.
No, I’ve gone through that same thing many times myself. Because they called him ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, hey, I’m from Menlo Park!’ And then it turns out it’s a different Menlo Park.
KB: I mean… It’s not untrue though.
I mean, yeah, I can still hype it up. What people don’t know won’t hurt them.
KB: We won’t tell.
So how’s it going?
KB: Great! Full disclosure: We’re each having a beer right now, because we work at Vimeo and every Friday at 4:30, out comes the beer cart. They roll it around the office, and usually the person who takes it around is the newest employee, and they wheel around this cooler and people get beers and chitchat. And right now —
BS: They’re playing Jenga out there.
KB: Yeah, they’re fucking playing games out in the bullpen right now. It is really tech-y here.
Did you say they’re playing Jenga?
KB: There’s a Jenga game. There’s Cards Against Humanity. There’s a shuffleboard situation.
It’s like a rookie hazing ritual for the newest employee to take the beer cart around?
KB: It’s very gentle. There’s no hazing. It’s so that everyone in the company gets to interface with each other at some point. It’s pretty smart, actually.
So you guys are having a beer at the tech office and I’m at my mom’s house.
KB: You’re so cool.
BS: You’re the Wizard of Menlo Park. [Laughs]
KB: Yeah, the Wizard of Menlo Park.
So first of all, I really loved the three new episodes. They were totally all over the map. The show’s at this great place now, where I never really know what to expect out of an episode.
KB: That’s a great compliment! Thank you.
So how did you guys first get interested in writing and filmmaking, and what were your first forays into that like?
KB: I think both Ben and I were those kids of the 80s who played with camcorders and edited in-camera and made movies with friends —
BS: Music videos, mostly.
KB: Yeah, music videos that we lip-synced to. My friends and I scripted things with our Barbie dolls and made Barbie movies. Funnily enough, one of my earliest works was an anti-drug film that I made. I was like 10, and me and my friends — these neighborhood girls Pamela and Angela — had the camcorder, and we always made little movies together and made this little short. It was a cautionary tale about drug use, where this guy basically buys a bag of coke in an alley, and of course it was a bag of flour and it was HUGE. We had no concept of units that drugs should be measured out in because it was literally like a full-on kilo, like a full bag of flour. It was a pretty thin plot that ended with the guy jumping off a structure, which was the addition to the back of Pamela and Angela’s house. He did all this blow and then jumped off of a deck-in-progress. And their backyard was totally torn apart for the building, so we constructed what looked like fresh grave in the yard, and threw a rose on the grave while Martika’s “Toy Soldiers” played in the background. And that was one of my first films. I guess, when I really think back, I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. I wrote plays in sixth grade. Me and a couple other kids in the class wrote the fall play for our school.
Was that also cocaine-themed?
KB: [Laughs] No, I went to an evangelical Christian school. Which was funny, because there was a Turkish family that came to our school that year. There were four kids in different grades, and I decided we should base the fall play around this family. Which… looking back, I feel so bad. We kind of just forced this poor family into being the protagonists of our school play, and it was all about us teaching them about Thanksgiving.
Ben and I are in a really supportive relationship. And I was the bread-winner for the first half of our relationship. I was the one who proposed to Ben. So there’s been some traditional roles that have been subverted in our lives, and it makes sense that we would reflect that in our work.
Oh god.
KB: And evangelizing; giving the message of Christ to this poor Muslim family. That was what it was.
BS: The first time I ever operated a camera to great effect was when my brother and his friend Andrew were making a “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video, and I was the camera guy. I remember the, like, “dong-gi donk” guitar sound — those first chords opened up on the moon, and then I zoomed out and my brother and his friend walked over the top of our roof and their plan was to jump off the roof. It was like a 9-foot-high roof. So they were gonna jump off and then land on the ground and pick up their guitars. So Andrew jumped off the roof and picked up his guitar, and my brother jumped off the roof and fucking broke his foot. And he was like, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” I was 7 or 8 — very young. And he went to the hospital and I showed the video to EVERYONE. Everyone I could. And then the fucking tape disappeared, because he was embarrassed, probably. So after that it was just a bunch of music videos and lip-syncing. And then when I was in college, the first thing I ever edited was my senior year, we had to do a final project and I just didn’t want to write a paper. It was in my Russian Literature class and I filmed an alternate ending to “The Brothers Karamazov.” It was weird, but whatever, I learned how to edit there. And then after college, I kind of started learning how to do low-budget filmmaking. I taught myself via commercial contests and YouTube tutorials from, like, teenagers in Menlo Park. [Laughs] And just basically did self-taught, shoestring-budget filmmaking and just tried to win commercial contests, and made that my living for a couple of years. And then I met Katja.
KB: And here we are.
BS: And here we are, yeah.
What’s a commercial contest?
KB: You know how like, around the Super Bowl, like Doritos will have a commercial-making contest, like “Win $100,000 if your commercial wins!” There’s tons of those going on at any given time.
BS: And in the mid-aughts, there were a lot of them, but not a lot of people knew about them, and there were low entry rates. So I would just target the ones that had the lowest amount of entries, and if the amount that you could make was significant, then the effort was worth my time.
So you made commercials for Doritos?
BS: Well, those were the most popular ones. I would go make a commercial for, like, Hunt’s Tomato Sauce, or whatever, and they would have some little assignment that you were trying to fulfill. Right before I met Katja, I had just won something for a Nissan Cube campaign. And I went to L.A. feeling very confident — and also thinking that I had cancer, but it was just a sore neck — and then Katja and I kind of met at a party in L.A. vis-à-vis my brother and our sister-in-law and another friend, and we kind of just really hit it off there, and have been attached at the hip ever since.
KB: Yeah, we’ve been together ever since.
Is it because you guys both first made films with people jumping off of roofs in them?
KB: Maybe so. It wasn’t until we just said that that I made that connection.
It’s just that common background.
KB: It’s more likely or more accurate to say that the connection was forged when Ben saw that I brought my own pipe to this party that we were both at. He recognized his own, and that’s probably how we first really got talking.
It was sort of BYO-Pipe kind of party.
KB: I mean, isn’t it always?
So for you guys as writers and creators, what’s the starting point for a story, and how do you know when it’s done, when you’ve fleshed it out enough?
BS: It really is different for every episode. Sometimes it’s the actor, sometimes it’s the emotion, many times it is the climax. I would say about half the time, we will think of that moment that every episode is building up to, and then we’re like ,’Here’s where we need to get to, here’s the kind of person we want to tell a story about, and a weed element has to be in there’ — but the character doesn’t have to be a weed smoker necessarily; it’s just that my face is kind of the link between all of the episodes. And really, we’ve made it so that The Guy can just bump into someone on the street. It doesn’t have to be a weed deal. It has been, but we try not to get hung up on the weed element. We try to think of something that we haven’t seen before.
It felt like there was an expectation that if you click on a web video, if it’s a short, it’s going to deliver comedy. So to do anything different than that felt risky to us, and that’s why we put “Helen” later in the lineup. But for sure, after we got the reaction to that episode — I mean, a lot of people were citing that as their favorite episode at that time.
KB: Or just something that’s really on our minds at that time, something that we just want to work out with some actors — the way that I used to do with my Barbies. [Laughs]
Right. And that Turkish family.
KB: Yeah. The Jafars.
How long does writing each of them generally take?
BS: It’s hard to say. You know, with the “Rachel” episode, we had the kernel of that episode in our minds for a long time, but it only came together when we were hanging out with Dan [Stevens] and asked him if he would do an episode where[in] he was a cross-dresser, and his wife was like, ‘Yes!’ So he was like, ‘OK, but I’m doing ‘Night at the Museum’ in two weeks, and then I’m leaving for a while.’ And then we were like, ‘Oh shit.’ So we wrote that in a week and we shot it the next week. With the last episode of these six that we’re just releasing, we knew the location of where we were gonna shoot, but we didn’t write the episode until days before we actually left for [the] location. However, in the ‘Genghis’ episode, with the teacher, we had known we wanted to write that episode for a long time, and the beats were kind of laid out for that for a while; it was just a matter of having a situation where we could actually use a school. The same goes for the episode coming up in the next cycle, about a stoner couple who get priced out of Williamsburg. We had had that episode in our back pocket for —
KB: For three years, approximately since the time that WE got priced out of Williamsburg. [Laughs] That one’s been kicking around for a little bit.
Those wounds are still fresh.
KB: Kind of.
So was the “Genghis” episode based on the experiences of friends, or personal experiences?
BS: I attempted to become a New York Teaching Fellow, and toward the end of the training, I was like, ‘This is definitely not for me.’ Just because I felt that the system was so broken that I could just see the end of that career very clearly, so I felt like I shouldn’t even try.
KB: And Ben’s dad was a public school teacher. He retired recently. He never made money that was commensurate to the work that he put out. It’s kind of depressing to sort of look at the situation and take stock of the educational system. We weren’t necessarily trying to make a comment on it, but —
BS: We were shining light on it. I mean, the retention rate for teachers is like, 30 percent.
So episodes like “Rachel” or “Genghis” or “Qasim” have a certain ‘twist’ element to them. Those are episodes that went a totally different direction than the one I thought they were going. There’s a feeling of the rug getting pulled out from under you.
KB: We feel like we’ve created an expectation of that ‘reversal’ from our audience. So there is a little bit of pressure there. That being said, I don’t know that it’s present in all of our episodes. Although, you did sort of illuminate for me that there is a reversal in “Genghis,” which I didn’t really consider to be a reversal.
BS: The thing is that he’s such a nice guy.
KB: The reversal is that he becomes cynical.
BS: He gets burnt out. Which actually isn’t a surprise at all —
KB: Not a surprise if you know what the education system looks like… But yeah, we do like to keep people guessing. We would hate for people to say that we were being clichéd or ordinary. ‘Basic’ seems like the thing you don’t want to be called now. We’re trying to avoid it. So if we are succeeding, then we’re glad.
I would say about half the time, we will think of that moment that every episode is building up to, and then we’re like ,’Here’s where we need to get to, here’s the kind of person we want to tell a story about, and a weed element has to be in there’ — but the character doesn’t have to be a weed smoker necessarily; it’s just that my face is kind of the link between all of the episodes.
Was there a particular episode that you first tried that ‘reversal’ or ‘twist’ element with?
BS: “Heidi.”
KB: Yeah, “Heidi”… but also, “Helen,” the one about the shut-in character. Although we didn’t write the script on that one — we wrote the story. That’s the only episode that we’re not the credited writers on. Michael Cyril Creighton, who plays Patrick, actually penned it after the story that we wrote. And yeah, that was the first time we tried out that sort of reversal thing in a really significant way, and felt the payoff from it. And “Heidi” is where we really found our rhythm, and saw how funny a reversal could be. Because the “Helen” reversal is really more sad. So once we found the joy of a comedic reversal, it sort of felt like we had to repeat that a few more times. And I guess that’s what we’re still trying to do.
As a viewer, “Helen” really felt like a turning point in the series. I read that even though it’s the fifth episode in the series, it’s actually the third one you guys made. It seemed like it was a transition point from more funny to more serious, and since then you’ve gotten comfortable doing more serious episodes. Was that something that you envisioned for the series right from the start?
KB: Yeah, for sure. But we didn’t know if people would tune in for that. It felt like there was an expectation that if you click on a web video, if it’s a short, it’s going to deliver comedy. So to do anything different than that felt risky to us, and that’s why we put “Helen” later in the lineup. But for sure, after we got the reaction to that episode — I mean, a lot of people were citing that as their favorite episode at that time.
Absolutely.
KB: So we definitely felt like we had permission to go darker and be sad sometimes, and we’ve definitely taken people up on that, and are still doing that.
BS: I gotta say — comedy is hard, man. And I think, you know, there’s nothing worse than something that’s meant to be funny that’s not actually funny. So as much as it is seemingly brave to put out some drama on a web series, it’s actually surprisingly easy to make people feel bad. Like this “Ruth” episode that we’re putting out —
KB: We had a lot of stress about releasing that, honestly. We had a lot of anxiety.
Really?
KB: Yeah. Because of the length and the pacing of it — it’s a little more of a slower pace than some of the other episodes, there’s a lot more awkward silences, the length of it is considerably longer.
BS: And also it’s a less ‘cool’ demographic.
KB: Yeah, the people depicted aren’t really hip. But actually that’s the one that’s been cited as the favorite thus far of the people who have viewed the new episodes, which is SO reassuring and feels so cool, that people are like, ‘Yeah, I like that, give us more of that.’
He did all this blow and then jumped off of a deck-in-progress. And their backyard was totally torn apart for the building, so we constructed what looked like fresh grave in the yard, and threw a rose on the grave while Martika’s “Toy Soldiers” played in the background. And that was one of my first films.
As a viewer, there’s something incredibly compelling about the balance that’s being handled in those darker episodes. They never lose track of some sort of upbeat thread, but they go in these surprisingly dark places in a way that’s really compelling. In episodes like “Jonathan” or “Brad Pitts,” you guys take on some really heavy stuff. Was it hard approaching topics like a shooting or cancer?
BS: No, because — well, with “Jonathan” and the shooting, it’s Hannibal Buress, and the expectation is it’s gonna be funny. So what was interesting us was putting the reversal in the middle of the episode and letting the episode just quietly land from that, and not necessarily letting it resolve, but having that last moment where the viewer assumes that he can make a joke again or whatever. It doesn’t quite clean itself up very neatly, and that was an exciting episode for us to do. With “Brad Pitts,” we don’t say that she had cancer in that.
KB: We don’t ever explicitly name what’s wrong with her, but we can all infer that it’s cancer. And god, whose life hasn’t been touched by that? Everybody has a family member or friend or multiple people in their lives who have had cancer. So no, it wasn’t hard to talk about that, because everyone’s been there.
BS: And I don’t feel like it was difficult necessarily, because those are two topics where once someone’s been through that — man, you’re on their side right away.
KB: Well, they’re victims.
BS: But to have somebody who’s kind of an asshole or normal or whatever —
KB: Not a hero.
BS: Right, not a hero — well then, comedy is the way to get on their side. And that’s fucking hard. You know what I mean? It is hard to get us to like a jerk, unless they’re really funny.
KB: They have to be so funny.
A bunch of your episodes satirize various New Yorkers and their lifestyles, but in a manner that doesn’t end up feeling mean-spirited or mocking. I’m curious how you guys walk that line between satire and mockery.
KB: Well, a lot of the ‘mockery’ that you see is really us making fun of ourselves. Like, when we make fun of those bougie people and their bougie tastes, it’s usually us making fun of ourselves and our friends in a general kind of a way. So I think that keeps it from going into the zone of being too much. We definitely have a fair amount of self-awareness surrounding us with all of this — we’re very aware of all of our faults, probably TO a fault. And I feel like these episodes are often us working that out. It’s kind of you to say that we walk the line, because that’s obviously where you want to be, so thank you. I’m not really sure how we do it, we just — we value plausibility, so I think that keeps things grounded. If it doesn’t seem possible, then we’re not going to portray it. And truth be told, we come home and tell each other stories and the ending sometimes is, “I can’t believe that that happened! If I wrote it, people would think it’s over the top!” That’s how we kind of approach everything. So I guess that’s how we keep it from going too much into parody.
So “Trixie” and “Rachel” are both episodes that seem to explore the dynamic of healthy relationships, and how couples can work together and support each other, albeit in a non-pretentious and not-in-your-face sort of way. I’m curious if that was a goal for you guys in writing those episodes.
BS: No, you’re the first person who’s said anything like that.
KB: And right off the bat, it’s interesting because both of those episodes feature that couple, Candace [Thompson] and John [Peery.] They’re the protagonists of “Trixie” and then they’re in the B story of “Rachel,” and they are very much playing versions of themselves in those moments. I mean, they’re not exactly like those people and no, they’re not doing exactly the things that those characters are doing, but the relationship dynamic is truthful. And they do have a healthy relationship — those two have been together for almost a decade. They appear to have a very balanced relationship, and I don’t think that Candace or John would disagree when I say that, if you want to go into those traditional roles, Candace is kind of the more ‘masculine’ energy of that relationship in certain ways. She just has a very strong presence and personality, and she’s more assertive and has those qualities that tend to define men. And John is definitely the more sensitive, emotional one. It’s cool that we got to sort of put it to film — they’re really close, close friends of ours. And it’s really cool that you picked up on that vibe. It wasn’t conscious. But obviously it makes sense that they showed up in that episode about gender roles. We weren’t being intentional about it, but our subconscious must have tuned into something.
And with “Rachel,” that’s kind of the reversal there. You put the viewer in the position where they’re projecting a certain relationship dynamic, and the twist is that it’s not actually there. It ends up being this incredibly sweet kind of thing where the twist is that they’re in this really supportive relationship.
KB: Yeah, I mean — Ben and I are in a really supportive relationship. And I was the bread-winner for the first half of our relationship. I was the one who proposed to Ben. So there’s been some traditional roles that have been subverted in our lives, and it makes sense that we would reflect that in our work.
