The first half of the first episode of HBO’s High Maintenance plays like a really good webisode.
Maybe because that’s what High Maintenance, which debuts at 10 p.m. ET Friday, started out to be.
It became a quirky cult fave on the web, with six “seasons” that produced 19 short episodes.
Creators Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfield created a series of stories that played more like skits, as a marijuana dealer called just The Guy (Sinclair) delivered his product to clients around Manhattan.
The clients were all quirky and often unintentionally funny, with various absurdities in which all viewers – stoner or not – could recognize behavior they knew.
It was satiric in a sense, a bemused look at a subculture, but it was also stories about plain old people in a big old city, trying to make it from one day to the next.
In picking up High Maintenance for a six-episode first season, HBO is gambling that a cult idea can move to a bigger room while keeping its original charm.
That’s been a tough transition for several web series in the past, and the first HBO episode suggests it will at least be an issue here as well.
In the first 12-15 minutes, The Guy makes a $200 delivery to a client who’s in the middle of a screaming fight with his girlfriend when The Guy arrives.
The girl storms out and The Guy wants to wrap up this awkward moment as quickly as possible. Here’s the weed, thanks for the money.
The client, however, boiling with unspoken frustration over the girlfriend fight, starts taunting The Guy.
He asks loaded questions like whether The Guy would consider giving discounts to regular customers. He insists The Guy have a smoke with him, indicating he will be offended if the answer is no.
All the while the client is playing with a samurai sword, giving the scene a vague tone of menace.
We don’t really think he’s going to attack The Guy, who is after all his dealer. Still, all of us also know or have seen people who seem like with the right provocation they could do something stupid and harmful.
It’s a scene shot through with absurdist humor, and Sinclair plays it in the popular contemporary style of comics like Louie C.K.
He’s a little befuddled. He’s also acutely aware of what’s going on and he just wants to slip out from under the discomfort as quickly as possible.
The second half of the first HBO High Maintenance is where some concern starts to surface.
It’s a more complicated riff involving several people whose interconnected stories finally wind back to The Guy.
It includes a 12-step group, a bizarre male/female relationship and gay Internet sex hookups, for starters. It’s also sexually explicit in a way that could limit the show’s potential to attract curious casual viewers.
More importantly, the first episode feels like less of a cohesive drama by the end than it felt in the beginning.
The positive here is that High Maintenance seems to have kept much of the free-spirited creativity that made it a Web fave. That will help as it tries to take root in new soil.