Well now. In which we discuss the merits of television (“It’s not TV, Dave. It’s HBO”.) portraying our fair city . . . Do they get it right or nah?
Illustration by Giacomo Gambineri
By Willy Staley | Jan. 30, 2020
It was probably during the fourth episode of the second season of HBO’s “High Maintenance” when I finally noticed what it was up to. The show follows a weed dealer known only as The Guy while he bikes around Brooklyn, leading the viewer into his customers’ homes and lives, where the cameras remain long after he’s gone, letting us peer into their problems, quirks, traumas and anxieties. Like many representations of New York on TV, it’s loosely predicated on the notion that people who live here are inherently more interesting than people who live in, say, Milwaukee. This particular episode centers on a man named Baruch who has just left one of Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox sects. His hair is still twisted into payos, and he’s crashing with a friend in a squalid railroad apartment, looking for whatever work he can find by plugging search terms like “kosher jobs” into Craigslist. He tells his friend that he’s going on a date with a shiksa, one who has been asking him penetrating questions. “Wait a minute,” the friend responds. “Is she a writer?”
She is indeed a writer, on assignment for Vice, and she has fooled Baruch into thinking they’re going on a date. She invites him to a nightclub, where she quickly abandons him. He then meets another woman, leaves with her as the club empties out at dawn and then the two, hungry from a night of dancing, go in search of food. They find their way to a bodega, where he orders tuna salad on a bagel and immediately inhales enough of it to obstruct his windpipe. A drag artist who had been dancing at the same nightclub — and whose elaborate preparations the episode had also been following — happens to be in that same bodega, and luckily, just so happens to be a doctor. He performs an emergency tracheotomy with the barrel of a ballpoint pen, saving Baruch’s life. Well, I thought as the credits rolled, that’s New York for you.
“High Maintenance” has a wide ambit, and its vignette-based structure provides it the freedom to depict New York more accurately and fully than anything that has come before it. It’s a formula that has won it near-universal praise from TV critics, who admire the show for its roving empathy and nonjudgmental gaze. Here the city contains its multitudes: It’s a place rich with living history and lousy with self-centered 26-year-olds; a gentrified husk of its former self and yet still the promised land for countless newcomers from near and far; lonely and cacophonous, utterly predictable and endlessly surprising. But the show’s sharp eye for sociological detail and obsessive dedication to realism exist in tension with these moments of ostentatious surprise.
If you see enough of the show, this okey-doke maneuver starts to form a pattern. There is the tough-talking, musclebound customer and his sidekick who menace and hustle The Guy into taking a pile of change instead of the $200 he’s owed — who are later revealed to be British method actors. There is the elderly Chinese couple who gather cans to support themselves — and whose son is an experimental theremin player living in Europe. There’s the middle-aged woman who is kidnapped off the street in front of her house — by a crew of dominatrixes who tie her up, call her a pig and flog her, the whole experience later revealed to be a birthday present from her girlfriend. There’s a downtrodden upstate woman who cleans up after city folk in their weekend rentals — and is a craft-beer nerd. There’s a construction worker who moves to the city from Puerto Rico — and falls for his bodega guy (who likes him back). The show is brilliant at sending up the anxieties and pathologies of the city’s yuppies, but characters outside this circle are often made relatable to HBO’s audience by being supplied with some quirk, hidden talent or non-normative sexuality. In this way, the show depends on its audience’s prejudices in order to undercut them.
The episode about the Hasid, like many in the show, takes pains to faithfully replicate reality: Baruch was played by Luzer Twersky, an actual defector from an ultra-Orthodox sect in Brooklyn; his character’s story contains details seemingly pulled from a Tablet podcast episode about Twersky’s life outside the wire; the apartment he lives in is recognizably a North Brooklyn railroad, complete with a living room as wide as a broom closet; the nightclub is clearly House of Yes in Bushwick, the kind of place that would host the sort of fine-art drag performer who saves Baruch’s life — in fact, Darrell Thorne, who plays the dancer-doctor, has performed at House of Yes.
Only, Thorne is not a doctor. He’s a performance artist and designer, which is probably more interesting, definitely cooler and certainly more conducive to being up at 5 a.m. wandering around Bushwick after leaving a nightclub. If you consider this detail — wedged into an otherwise painstakingly accurate reality — you can start to see the contours of the ascendant televised version of New York, not at all limited to “High Maintenance,” in which the collisions generated by the city’s constant rearrangement of humanity bring us all, in the end, to greater mutual understanding. It’s an extremely pleasing fantasy and a more noble one than those that preceded it — and, thanks in part to lucrative tax incentives for filming in New York, it hides in plain sight within hyperrealistic depictions of city life. But it occasionally reveals itself through contortions in the storytelling. The fixations that any self-respecting series about young people in New York ought to have (sex, drugs, work) are deployed in the service of transforming the city from the Hobbesian place it can be into a moral training ground — for protagonist and viewer alike.
Today, Bushwick is, in fact, a place where a Vice journalist, a drag artist and a lapsed Hasid might all cross paths, but that’s a recent development. The only neighborhood in New York built entirely out of vinyl siding, Bushwick has a history richer than its appearance lets on. It is land that belonged to the Lenape and was then settled by the Dutch; it then became a center of beer brewing, fueled by droves of German immigrants; they gave way to Italian-Americans — you can still see grapevines in some backyards — who fled during the postwar years as Puerto Rican and black New Yorkers and Latin American immigrants made the neighborhood their own for decades, until, all of a sudden, creative-class types started spilling over from the other side of Flushing Avenue.
Related: Willy Staley’s NYT piece on pro skateboarder Tyshawn Jones