High Maintenance Reviews are Rolling in
Critics agree that High Maintenance is a winner
Before HBO brings out the big guns this October, it has a smaller series to debut. The new series, High Maintenance, is a continuation of a cult web series of the same name. HBO recently made all back episodes of High Maintenance available for streaming, and that may be something you’re going to want to invest in before diving in. Reviews of the first five episodes are starting to roll in, and they just about all agree that HBO has not killed the show’s edge.
There are many potential problems in adapting an indie series for a wider audience, but apparently that’s not really what HBO was every interested in doing. According to Flavor Wire, “High Maintenance pulls off the tricky feat of speaking to both longtime fans of the original version and newcomers to the HBO show.” Other outlets, such as Rolling Stone, agree.
That is to say, if you’ve seen High Maintenance before and were a fan of it style, that’s not going to change. It comfortably retains its indie roots while being generally accessible to a wider audience. Going into the series cold isn’t a problem, though there are plenty of callbacks and old characters. Pulling from three different sources, Metacritic has assigned the fledgling HBO series a 69, which sounds about right.
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Letting critics preview so many episodes early can boost the profile of a show, especially if it’s new. It can also kill something before it’s able to get off the ground, such as what happened when critics let loose their reviews of the second season of True Detective. It is, at times, a double-edge sword. There are many people right now that may tune into High Maintenance when just a couple of days ago they had no idea what it was.
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Still, there is something to walking into a new series or season relatively blind, like what HBO ultimately decided to do with Game of Thrones. That’s tough to do when critics are already able to write about the first five episodes.
High Maintenance will premiere on September 16th