Netflix and chillum?
Hulu and hash?
Amazon Prime and pre-roll?
There is some disturbingly good cannabis-focused streaming content out right now, which is great news during social distancing.
Gone are the days when every weed-smoker is some bleary-eyed caricature, bumbling through life in a haze of smoke. Sometimes funny, sometimes educational, and always entertaining, cannabis content has expanded to reflect the wide variety of people who consider themselves smokers.
We’ve chosen some of our favorite streaming programs that you can watch right now. Smoke a bowl, turn out the lights, and enjoy.
High Maintenance
The premise of High Maintenance is simple enough. An unnamed cannabis delivery man (The Guy) bikes around New York, delivering weed to clients. Each episode is focused on a new cast of characters as The Guy weaves his way through the city, meeting people from all walks of life along the way.
The show is genuine and smart, but it also serves as a reminder of the connection that exists throughout the anonymity of city life — especially apt when we’re all stuck at home.
This rotating cast means there’s room for great one-off performances from delightful faces like Hannibal Buress, Nick Kroll, Margaret Cho, Gaby Hoffmann, Dan Stevens, and Bob the Drag Queen, among others.
Don’t have HBO? That’s what free trials are for, fam. HBO’s trial only lasts 7 days. But with 34 half-hour episodes, you can get it all in under the wire if you just believe in yourself.
Keep an eye out for the GRAV Helix Clear Beaker Base Water Pipe...it’s The Guy’s daily driver.
The Marijuana Show
Got a business idea that is just too good for Shark Tank?
The Marjuana Show may be your best bet. This competition-style reality show lets aspiring marijuana-based entrepreneurs pitch their companies to investors for funding. The show has provided over $20 million of investment capital to contestants, and the founders also offer online training for the cannabis industry.
Some stories are surprisingly touching, like the 10-year-old who’s trying to get investors to save the family business after his dad’s marijuana possession arrest. Or the 24-year old who hopes to help cancer patients, and has spent his family’s entire savings to do it.
Beneath the reality-show antics lies a genuine desire to see marijuana legalized and to help these entrepreneurs get closer to their goals.
You can watch all three seasons for a one-time fee on the show’s website, or watch seasons 2 and 3 on Amazon Prime.
Weediquette
Although it may have started as a counterculture magazine in the 1990s, in more recent years Vice has gained some recognition for its investigative programming.
One of its best shows is a docuseries called Weediquette, hosted by Krishna Andavolu. The show explores the lives of people who exist day to day in the cannabis world.
He meets parents whose children use cannabis to manage cancer symptoms and veterans who use it to treat PTSD. He talks to growers — both legal and illegal — in the US and abroad. And he explores topics like driving while stoned, smoking while pregnant, and the intersection between weed and religion.
Krishna’s reporting is balanced and impressively impartial, even while tackling highly complicated issues.
You can catch the show on Hulu.
Broad City
I don’t know why it took so long for everyone to notice, but the world finally figured out that women like slacker comedies too! Hooray!
For one of the few forays into the genre, we have Broad City on Comedy Central. And it could not be more excellent.
The show follows stoner duo Abbi and Ilana as they go about their messy, messy New York lives with hilarious results. The friendship is real, the feminism is intersectional, and the slapstick is imaginative.
All five seasons are available on Hulu, so watch it.
And for a bonus show where the women are an absolute disaster, check out Absolutely Fabulous on Hulu. It’s very British and very 90s, if you like that sort of thing. Which I do. These ladies mix their champagne with vodka, pop pills of who knows what, and smoke weed in the bathroom to hide from the painfully responsible teenager downstairs.
Bong Appetit
Do you like cooking shows?
Do you like cooking shows...on weed?
I’m so sorry, I promise I’ll never ever do that again.
But it was only a matter of time before the ubiquity of the cooking competition got crossed with cannabis culture.
The result is Bong Appétit, another Vice production. The show actually underwent a dramatic revamp after the end of its second season. Originally a dinner-party theme exploring cannabis in different cuisines from around the world, it’s now a classic competition format.
Judged by chef/restaurateur Miguel Trinidad, founder of cannabis sweets shop Marigold Sweets Vanessa Lavorato, and Cypress Hill’s B Real, the show is a light-hearted take on the often over-dramatized cooking genre.
It’s no surprise that stoners like food, so this is a must-watch! Catch it on Hulu.
Murder Mountain
Other than some of the episodes of Weediquette, our programming has been pretty light so far.
But it’s about to get dark.
Cannabis content creators haven’t missed the absolute mania for the true crime genre. So it was only a matter of time before the two collided into Murder Mountain.
This docuseries explores the murder of 29-year-old Garret Rodriguez, a Humboldt County marijuana grower who was killed in 2013. Garret’s death is only one of the nefarious crimes taking place in these California mountains. The sparsely populated county has the second-highest murder rate in the state of California — allegedly due to the Wild West atmosphere that reigns here among rival weed farms.
If you’re a fan of crime documentaries, this one should be on your list. Watch it on Netflix.
So that’s some scripted comedies, a little reality tv, and a couple of docuseries, all revolving around our favorite little green plant. This should keep us all occupied for a while, right?
What streaming series should we watch when we’ve binged our way through all of these?
