<em>High Maintenance</em> Goes Naked
How’s this for an opening hook of a TV season? An elderly, unkempt, and out-of-shape male character that viewers have never before seen, stark naked, picks up an ungainly pot of boiling water from a stove. Slowly, awkwardly, with great straining, he carries it up some stairs. Will he drop the pot and scald his genitals? is the main suspense on offer. Not easy viewing.
But fans of the should realize by its third season that this isnot a comedy of cruelty—even though the show likes to toy with the via such horrors as snakes, meth, hospital beds, dance marathons, tracheotomies, and heartbreak. The web series turned HBO comedy about a marijuana delivery dude is a gentle work of sociology, asking who people—all sorts of people—really are, and not harshly judging the answers that it discovers. Thankfully and typically, then, the third season really requires an un-trigger warning (and mild spoiler) of sorts: The naked man does not get scorched.
