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.
I landed there a little over a decade ago and found a room that (I still like to boast) cost less than $500 a month — $484 to be exact. From there, I moved across the J train tracks to Bed-Stuy for a couple of years, where I watched the buildings on either side of mine get bought, emptied of their tenants, renovated and filled up with new ones. Next, I moved to Ridgewood, so deep into Bushwick that I was actually in Queens, where the old limestones on my block literally doubled in value over the course of four years. I had to constantly erase and redraw whatever outer boundary I’d placed on gentrification’s eastward march, until I realized there might never be one.
But Bushwick was something to behold. Whenever I passed through, I felt as if I were in that movie “Dark City,” where malevolent beings rearrange the urban environment while the populace sleeps; high-concept bars seemed to materialize out of the ether. Today, while it’s not exactly what you’d call a fancy neighborhood, the median rent for a one-bedroom in Bushwick is $2,200 a month. It’s a peculiar situation. Hordes of privileged but precarious young people — not personally wealthy, for the most part, but not without considerable advantages over their new neighbors — now live atop and throughout an area that had always been, and continues to be, working-class.
To depict young New Yorkers’ lives on TV with even a modicum of fidelity, you must take this fraught remapping of the city into account: This is how your critics live, this is how many of your viewers live and, thanks to the collapsing value of creative labor in the age of streaming TV, this may be how you live, too. And while New York is still the pleasure dome that less ethically burdened depictions (“Sex and the City,” for example, or even “Girls”) made it out to be, it’s no longer quite so easy to enjoy without reservation. There is some sense that this all comes at a cost — one that mostly falls on others. And who wants to think about all that while watching TV? But this unease can be sublimated into an idealized vision of the city, achieved by bringing in a more diverse array of New Yorkers while extinguishing the class differences that sometimes exist between them. Its days as a melting pot long behind it, the city can be reimagined as something more like a hot tub.
It’s comforting to believe that any tension spurred by gentrification can be offset by moral generosity, and no show captures this attitude better than the first season of “Master of None” on Netflix — though it seems to do so wholly by accident. The show, co-created by and starring the comedian Aziz Ansari, follows Dev Shah, an actor living in what appears to be Brooklyn, and his three best friends. All four are written, somewhat unconvincingly, to be born-and-raised New Yorkers. It’s an admirably diverse cast, something Ansari wanted for the show and a theme he wrote into it: The vexing difficulty of telling the stories of nonwhite people in a monochromatic entertainment industry runs through the plot, thanks to the fact that Dev has the same job as Ansari. The show was widely praised for its handling of race and for its realistic depiction of New York City’s ethnic makeup. And while it is certainly more representative of New York on a surface level, it manages to avoid any discussion of class by making the principal cast just as carefree, if not more so, than the ladies of “Sex and the City.”
In fact, the show practically doubles as a Zagat guide, with Dev spending most of his free time at North Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan’s finest establishments. These are all real places, and websites like Thrillist and Eater have even made guides based on Dev’s perambulations. We have no idea where he grew up in the city, or what he makes of its rapid transformation over the 30-odd years of his life, but we do know that he likes to go to places like Hotel Delmano and Achilles Heel, bars that hawk those $15 cocktails with names like Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room. These are places that arrived around the time Williamsburg started becoming too expensive even for hipsters who first invaded the area, when the waterfront started to resemble Dubai. They’re also the kinds of places where someone like Ansari, a notorious foodie, and his friends would hang out.
The moral tax for this charmed, craft-cocktail-fueled New York is the openly didactic nature of the show. Nearly every episode in the first season serves to teach Dev (and the viewer) a particular lesson, like Aesop in Williamsburg. The net effect is to render New York into something like Birthright or a polycule: a carnal bounty served with a side of ideological instruction. In the pilot, Dev learns that he’s not ready to have children over sandwiches from Parm; in the next episode, he is somberly reminded of the sacrifices his parents made to provide him a good life in the United States, so he decides to take them out to dinner at Shun Lee Palace; a few episodes later, he sleeps with a married food critic played by Claire Danes, gets caught in flagrante and, when he runs into the couple later, the cuckolded husband thanks him for sleeping with his wife because the infidelity helped fix what was broken in their marriage; in another episode, Dev learns about street harassment, catches a man masturbating on the subway, makes a citizen’s arrest to applause from his fellow strangers — and is thanked for being a good feminist ally by his co-workers, who buy him a cake as a gesture of their gratitude. All these situations are heightened and ostensibly comedic, but Dev’s sentimental education is portrayed with an utterly straight face. The season ends with Dev, fresh off a breakup, deciding to follow his dream of going to Italy to learn to make pasta.
As upscale restaurants and bars replace the workaday businesses that used to make up the heart of Brooklyn neighborhoods — auto-body shops, steam-table joints, bars that don’t serve craft cocktails — there has been a concordant, or perhaps corrective, rise in what I’ve come to think of as bodega fetishism. Young people in New York have a tendency to treat these convenience stores like magical realms, a unique expression of New York’s nonstop bustle and irreducible strangeness, instead of the ordinary feature of any urban landscape that they are. As the rest of the city’s character has been sanded away, bodegas have proved surprisingly resilient and have become, in many ways, a portal to a New York that no longer exists: unvarnished, idiosyncratic, sometimes illicit. Here, you can buy cigarettes smuggled up Interstate 95 from Virginia or a loose Newport 100 rattling around in an open box; you can buy beer, chips, candy, quarter waters, sure, even tuna salad on a bagel at 5 a.m. You might get to know the proprietor a little bit, make small talk, maybe even stash an extra house key there. A lot of businesses used to foster this sort of low-stakes relationship, but now it’s just the bodegas, which must bear the burden of a whole generation’s yearning for the very stuff their presence in New York has eliminated.
“Russian Doll,” the Netflix series co-created by and starring Natasha Lyonne, depicts New Yorkers tormented by their personal histories, in a city haunted by its past — and it revolves around a time-warping bodega. The show centers on Nadia, who finds herself trapped in a “Groundhog Day” situation, where she keeps dying and waking up in the bathroom of her friend’s apartment — a former Yeshiva converted to lofts — on the night of her 36th birthday. She must continue reliving these same days until she can figure out a way to escape. It is the most fantastical depiction of New York on TV, and yet also situated in the real — sort of. Though set in the present day, it mostly concerns a young artistic crowd of people, all of whom live near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, something that hasn’t been economically feasible for at least a couple of decades.
A pivotal scene takes place early on at Nadia’s local bodega, where she goes for condoms and briefly watches a stranger who is falling-down drunk, ultimately deciding to leave him be. Soon after, she is killed by a taxi. Nadia returns to the bodega many times in the course of figuring out what is happening to her. She eventually discovers that the drunken man she ignored, Alan, went on to kill himself the same night that she died, and furthermore that he’s friends with Farran, the cashier at the bodega. (Nadia, it should go without saying, is also tight with Farran.) At one point, Nadia asks Farran how he knows Alan. He tells her that they worked together at a cannery in Alaska. When she expresses surprise, he clarifies that he was kidding.
“We actually pledged Alpha Delta in college,” he says. “That cannery thing, though? It’s pretty good. I put it in my novel.” This is not a joke: In that scene, he’s behind the counter, typing on his laptop.
The actual, transactional quasi friendships that New Yorkers have with their bodega guys are plenty interesting. Like a priest, a bodega guy gets to know the shameful weaknesses of his regulars, who must assume on some level that he’s not secretly writing their stories in his own head. His perspective would be an interesting one to get to know, but in “Russian Doll,” what’s curious about this relationship is rendered null with a couple of lines of dialogue. In trying to counteract harmful stereotypes, the show has succeeded in doing something altogether stranger: erasing diversity through the act of depicting it. By making Farran an aspirant to the same sort of success the show’s writers value, by making him a guy who thinks working at a cannery is inherently absurd, something you’d put in a novel, “Russian Doll” suggests that everyone in this city, at the end of the day, is ultimately the same, sharing identical aesthetic and professional aspirations, and we’d know that if we only paid closer attention.
That attitude fits with the moral of the show, which is that strangers hold the key to our salvation. The fact that they possess interiority, and that we generally don’t care, winds up being the cause of the time warp — and the way out of it. Alan and Nadia team up, eventually determining that they’re in some sort of purgatorial punishment and must right the karmic wrong that occurred in the bodega: Nadia must save Alan from his suicide. By the season finale, they are back at Farran’s store, but separated in alternate dimensions, strangers to each other once again. They must convince the other that they know them deeply in order to save them from their self-destruction, and only then are they freed. In the ecstatic closing sequence, they take part in some impromptu crustpunk Mummers parade, led by a homeless man named Horse (who, just like Farran, has been revealed to be a member of the professional class in disguise).
Watching this, I couldn’t help being reminded of the first episode of the second season of “High Maintenance,” which contains a similarly exuberant scene. This episode tells the stories of New Yorkers reacting to some world-changing event; the show plays coy, but it’s widely interpreted to be the 2016 presidential election. One of these New Yorkers is a barback forced to stay late because the bar is so busy, which in turn makes him late to pick up his young son from a relative’s apartment. He takes him home on the subway and presents him with a balloon. It’s a sweet story, and a clever one — a perfect rejoinder to any privileged New Yorker who has wondered, coming home from the bars late at night, what sort of parent would keep their kid out at this hour. The boy starts batting his balloon around, causing a scene, but rather than being annoyed, the nighthawks of New York — a nurse in scrubs, workers in safety vests — join in, smiles breaking across their faces as they come together, even in such uncertain times, for one sublime and spontaneous moment of laughter and joy. This is the New York City my generation dreams of, an A.S.M.R. role-play of cosmopolitan harmony, a city of weak bonds that generate nothing but warmth, a place within the flow of history and outside it all at once.
The fact that The Guy works in the delivery business makes “High Maintenance” unusually attuned to the city’s shifting anxieties and mores. Of course, as the eccentric local historian Timothy (Speed) Levitch explains in one episode, New York has always been a delivery town, ever since Collect Pond went sour with pollution and the city had to start importing water. But in recent years, it has become even more so. Nearly every subway car is plastered with ads for stuff you can have delivered right to your door (mattresses, bedding, electronic-toothbrush heads, meal kits, perfumes, generic Viagra) pitched in some approximation of online Millennial argot. Seamless, the dominant force in food delivery here, runs ads that make its value proposition grimly explicit: “Over 8 million people in New York City, and we help you avoid them all”; “Nothing ruins a good meal like other New Yorkers.” Some even lament the difficulty of calling restaurants where the staff might not understand you. Another says: “Food delivered faster than this neighborhood is gentrifying.”
What makes “High Maintenance” so intelligent is that it also documents the widespread isolation and alienation that make the fantasy so seductive. The Guy’s work brings him into the spaces where this loneliness is felt most acutely, and his easygoing charm allows his clients to open up to him, and to us. In the new season, you meet a young artist who hires a sex worker for a “boyfriend experience” and finds him somewhat needy; there’s an asexual (but not aromantic) amateur magician, a recurring character, who must overcome his aversion to physical touch when he starts dating an intimacy coordinator. One of the show’s best episodes is shot from the perspective of a dog, left at home all day in his Queens apartment by his depressive, workaholic (and, it is implied, Trump-voting) owner. The dog falls madly in love with the woman who comes to walk him. She’s attractive by human standards, but you get the sense the dog would love anyone who let him out for that cherished hour. In one poignant scene, the dog goes out with his owner on the weekend and encounters his dog friends from his weekday walks. He barks to greet them and is scolded by the man; neither owner knows a thing about the expansive inner lives of their pets, having been forced by city living to outsource their care.
Isolation perfumes the show, and this is the thing about “High Maintenance,” with its obsessive verisimilitude, that actually feels the most accurate. It’s a truism that living around so many others can make you feel paradoxically lonely, yet there are entirely novel ways of being alone, together. There are new ones invented every day.
To this generation of newcomers, moving to New York is quite different than it was in the past. As you arrive in the outer reaches of Brooklyn gentrification, you and everyone you know find yourselves spread thin geographically, specks of dust in distant orbit around Lower Manhattan, pressing up against communities that feel threatened by your presence. New York is as safe as it has ever been; if anyone’s the bad guy, it’s probably you. Of course, you hope that you aren’t, that you’re the kind of person who appreciates the city for its polyphony of voices, unlike some other newcomers, but in the end it won’t matter. And besides, after a long subway commute home, it’s easier than ever to not leave your apartment again: to order Seamless even though you told yourself you wouldn’t and pop on some streaming television, because there’s always something new to catch up on. And there, on the screen, is the New York you’d dreamed of, the one that challenges your perspective, the one that forces you to become a better version of yourself, the one where strangers come together and connect — even if it’s only for an instant.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
