Stoner series rolls onto screen, looks set to deliver
GETTING the greenlight for a pilot TV show isn’t easy. And even those that do get the greenlight are sometimes canned before the season is out.
But some filmmakers have found a loophole in this technologically-driven era. And web-based series/YouTube videos are the new trend. Heck, even Julia Anastasopoulos caught her big break as SuzelleDIY on Comedy Central after becoming an internet sensation.
Some shows that have made the transition from web to TV, albeit all not making it to our screens, include Broad City, Web Therapy, Ugly Americans and The Annoying Orange.
Now High Maintenance – think along the lines of a funny version of Weed – arrives on our screen.
The brainchild of husband and wife team, Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, it follows The Guy on his deliveries to clients in New York City.
Staying true to reality, they didn’t give this character a name. However, the entertainment is derived from the characters he engages with, travelling from the neighbourhoods in Brooklyn to Manhattan.
This is similar to the hilarious Drunk History, which aired on Comedy Central. It followed a very inebriated narrator recounting events from American history.
The lead character in High Maintenance is played by Ben Sinclair. Shedding light on the birth of the web-turned-TV series, he told TechCrunch: “This is a question we answer a lot, but I’m happy to do it one more time. I was an actor – still am – and an editor and had been working on short comedy videos and spec commercials. Katja has 10 years of experience in casting. She worked High Maintenance. on 30 Rock and a bunch of other shows.
“When we got together, we knew we wanted to work on something, but weren’t sure what it was. We’d done a couple of spec commercials together, branded content on a very small, low-budget scale. Then we came up with this idea. We don’t remember the specific time of when it happened, but we just figured that telling the story of a weed dealer is something that could take place in five minutes or less. Since we had no budget, we couldn’t use actors for a long period of time so we wanted to figure out a concept where we could rotate this pool of actors that we had come to know. That anthology style grew out of the constraints of not having any money to pay people to come more than one day. That’s where the idea came from, not some specific genesis.”
Blitchfield added: “We knew some actors whom we wanted to work with and whom we thought were talented so we tailored our writing to suit the resources we had. We thought about what kind of roles they would play. For example, our first episode is called Stevie and it’s the one about the assistant who has a very demanding boss. The woman who plays that assistant, Bridget Maloney-Sinclair, is our sister-in-law. When we originally started, she was someone we both were fans of professionally, as well as personally, so we wrote that part for her, because we knew her voice so well. For the subsequent four or five episodes, we thought, ‘who do we have? Who do they sound like? What do they do best? How do we use that to our advantage and to their advantage?’”
So far, it looks like this out-of-the-box approach is a winning formula for the couple. ● High Maintenance, M-Net Edge, Friday, 9.30pm.