Though Erin bonds with the director’s young son (Gabriel Gurevich), who copes with the loss by pretending he’s a dog, she struggles with his older daughter (Rileigh McDonald), who acts out and resents her very presence.

In the weaker second half, Erin (Christine Elmo), a multimedia dancer, works as a nanny for a Hollywood director whose wife recently died. Later, a final, heartbreaking exchange throws the entire story into sharp relief. Though Arturo finds Adriana’s obsession with the doll weird and off-putting, he softens when a public trip with the “baby” turns tense after a white woman accuses the two of being neglectful parents. The strong first half of “Proxy” follows Adriana (Rosie Perez) and Arturo (Guillermo Diaz), a married couple who purchase a silicone baby so they can playact as parents. It’s time for Vulture’s definitive of High Maintenance episodes, ranked from worst to best. With 44 episodes under its belt, spanning the internet and television, comprising stories about couples, loners, families, obsessives, and even a dog, it can be helpful for a newbie to know where to start, even though most all of them are worthwhile. A lot has changed since High Maintenance debuted, but its humanist, stoned energy maintains like an old friend.

Now, seven years later, the series has just wrapped its third season on HBO, it’s just been renewed for a fourth, and Sinclair and Blichfeld have ended their marriage, but not their creative partnership. Following a unnamed pot dealer (wonderfully played by Sinclair) who visits a different client every episode, the series relied upon concise storytelling, small apartment settings, and New York’s large talent pool to help bring their lo-fi stories to life. But High Maintenance, the best web series of the lot, never needed television as a support system.Ĭreated in 2012 by then-husband-and-wife team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld (a struggling actor and a casting director for 30 Rock, respectively), High Maintenance was built upon a simple premise that allowed for a wide variety of characters and stories. Now, the sustained success of shows like Insecure, Broad City, and Drunk History has proven to TV execs that the internet is its own talent pool waiting to be noticed, and that a little bit of industry support can go a long way.

In the early days of this decade, it was unclear if the DIY web series that populated YouTube and Vimeo could ever make the jump to TV.

24 season 2 episode 16