http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/arts/television/review-high-maintenance-hbo.html 2016-09-16 01:00:06 Review: ‘High Maintenance,’ Hipster Anthology, Reconjured on HBO The comedy’s leap from Vimeo to a half-hour TV slot gives the creators more latitude for pairing or interweaving its narratives of urban neuroses. === The characters of “High Maintenance” is a pot comedy only in the sense that “Cheers” was an alcohol comedy. Marijuana is simply the narrative device — the green herring, the Mr. Sinclair (who writes and directs the series with Katja Blichfeld, his wife) is nominally the star of the series. But like a good service professional, The Guy puts his clients first. He’s a temporary friend-shrink-rabbi, a kind of laid-back Uber-age bartender, representing the curious, empathetic, no-judgment perspective of the series itself. The earlier webisodes, which My worry, when the creators signed with HBO, was that the TV platform would turn it into something conventional, like a vegan pizza place in Bushwick becoming a chain. But the HBO half-hour format doesn’t flatten the show’s structure so much as give Ms. Blichfeld and Mr. Sinclair room to play with it. Some new episodes pair a short and a long story. Some stretch the full half-hour. Some interweave two narratives, as when a wistful slice of life about a young Muslim college student and a sex farce involving her older neighbors end up colliding. The series shares a setting and sensibility with comedies like But its biggest difference from most of today’s adventurous comedies is its short-story format. Many of TV’s most distinctive comedies now are at least somewhat serialized, and many — “High Maintenance,” on the other hand, ambles from character to character. It’s as interested in a pair of elderly immigrants as in the artsy proprietors of a “day care for adults.” In today’s first-person comedy environment, “High Maintenance” is refreshingly third-person, an approach that reflects a belief that any person can be the star of a story. Did I say “person”? The third and best of the six new episodes follows the peregrinations and emotional life of a dog who develops a passionate attachment to his hired walker. The unspeaking star becomes as richly drawn a protagonist as any of the series’ overcivilized humans. (Don’t worry; no animals were intoxicated in the making of the episode.) You don’t need to have seen the previous episodes to appreciate the new season, but several characters reappear, including a pair of self-centered roommates from the webisode The callbacks are prominent in an episode that re-enlists Homeless Heidi ( This wouldn’t be a hipster comedy, I guess, if I weren’t tempted at some point to say I liked it better back when I saw it playing a smaller venue. But success hasn’t really spoiled “High Maintenance,” even if, like its outer-borough haunts, it’s a little more well heeled. This is the same wry, peripatetic series at heart, a vision of urban life as a web of stories connected by wisps of smoke.