High Maintenance: Season 3

There's not a lot left to say about High Maintenance, the New York-as-hell show about all kinds of people doing all manner of things with their days and nights. It's an anthology series where every episode focuses on a different character or group of people - sometimes even switching focus halfway through an episode - and the only consistent character is a nameless weed dealer played by the show's creator.

I've got very mixed feelings about the show. I love that it exists, and I love that it's committed to this complete variety of perspective and point of view. One week will be about two unlikely roommates, one a nudist and the other a crazy old lady. Another week will be about an over-eager kid helping his mom out at her shift at a diner. But in a TV landscape where there's more and more and more to sample, it's almost like this show stretches itself too thin being as varied and inconsistent as it is. Like in a world where there are still "only," say, 200 shows out there, something this varied and meandering works a lot better than in a world where there are three times that many shows and where stories have been told about all manners of people doing all manners of things.

A consequence of all of this is that this show is almost completely forgettable on a week to week basis. I mentioned two plot points above, but there were nine episodes in Season 3 and I'm not sure I could get three more plot points. There was a scene where a paranoid doctor couldn't get a cat out of a tuba, so that's three. Lena Dunham showed up at one point, filming an episode of Girls, I think, and that already felt dated as hell! But even these memories I have - they're just scenes, they're not episodes; sketches, not stories.

All this is fine, and I think I'll keep watching High Maintenance - it's set on my DVR as a series recording, after all, and when I'm completely on the fence with respect to whether or not to keep going with this show, hey, it's a force of habit to watch stuff on my DVR rather than to delete it outright.