This year on April 20th cable giant HBO announced that they had picked up popular web-series High Maintenance for 6 episodes. This was a definite win for independent online creators, but despite the hype for being legitimized by major mainstream corporations, we’ve got to ask how well the show will translate for a wider more traditional audience and whether or not the show actually needs to move over to broadcast TV.

High Maintenance is a “series of shorts” created by husband/wife duo Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, which follows a weed dealer’s encounters with customers around the city of Brooklyn and their own personal stories. Their episodes can go as short as 5 minutes, which is very different from HBO’s own roster of shows which currently includes episodes that run for almost an hour long (Game of Thrones, The Wire, True Blood).

The episode above shows us that High Maintenance provides a lighthearted ‘show about nothing’ for a modern day audience, and since the project isn’t serialized, it lets people consume the show very easily. Just the fact that one could literally watch all 19 episodes in less than 3 and a half hours makes it very binge-worthy. It’s no surprise then that the show has garnered immense popularity since its inception in 2012 and became the first original web-series to be funded by Vimeo exclusively for Vimeo on Demand. Despite the extra funding though, creators Blichfeld and Sinclair still tried to keep the show with the same DIY tone and intimacy from the first 3 cycles (seasons). They did (slightly) achieve their goal of keeping the same quirky tone and subject matter but expanded from their initial apartment based locations in exchange for more open and expensive settings, such as a public school, which was a definite shift from original episodes.

It’s important to also acknowledge that High Maintenance has done what not many other online content creations have had the opportunity to do. Since Vimeo is still experimenting with their formula for distributing content, the creators had complete creative freedom along with funding. This along with receiving 90% of revenue is an extremely unique situation, with most platforms relying on advertisement revenue alone instead of consumers purchasing their content directly from the source, cutting out the messy middle man.

But that probably wont be the case once they transition over to HBO. For the time being High Maintenance will still have their first 19 episodes available to anyone online, but soon the new content will only be made available to HBO subscribers and the majority of viewers will be forced to either follow along with the show onto HBO, find other illicit ways of viewing the show or to forgo continuing the series altogether. Then there is also the probability that the creators Ben and Katja may not have as much creative control to do episodes in their previous ‘short and sweet’ episode format. It could also deter away old viewers by taking away that raw internet intimacy that audiences had when watching episodes directly purchased for their laptop screens, and lose that magic ‘nothingness’ in exchange for complex narratives or convoluted character arcs. This begs the question if it is worth it for a show like High Maintenance to move to television when they’ve got such a strong foundation online. I asked before whether the show should be made for TV, but I think we should look at it as whether we need TV at all to create a genuinely innovative show. This new decade has brought along amazing independent content, created outside of the traditional broadcast/cable market, with many shows and web-series’ becoming huge successes in their own right. Online shows have potential to reach billions of people, as long as they have access to the internet, but HBO only caters to their main 30 million TV subscribers. High Maintenance shouldn’t have to limit itself to such a relatively small market, just look at Key & Peele for example, and in my opinion traditional TV is quickly becoming obsolete. The internet has brought about a new era for TV, where audiences don’t need to be dependent on companies filtering content to us, and television should now no longer be seen as the be-all-end-all goal for all content creators.

There is good news in High Maintenance being acknowledged and progressing into the mainstream world, but very soon the media world will need to revise the new way we should approach what defines success in this new entertainment world.

 

Wagmeister, Elizabeth (2015) ‘HBO Brings Wed Series ‘High Maintenance’ to TV with New Episodes’, variety.com, article can be found here

Andreeva, Nellie (2015) ‘Pot Web Comedy ‘High Maintenance’ Moves To HBO With Series Order’, deadline.com, article can be found here

Epstein, Adam (2015) ‘Analysts: HBO Now already has about a million subscribers’, qz.com, article can be found here