Netflix is the answer to many of life’s nagging questions: How can I kill the next couple of hours? Is there nothing good on cable? What do you want to do tonight, honey? But no idle domestic query can match the crippling force and sheer terror of the stoner’s dilemma:
I’m high as fuck right now—who’s going to entertain me?
If you’ve vaped a little too hard, Netflix’s endless cascade of titles can be overwhelming. Save your bloodshot eyes the trouble: we picked 16 of the finest 420-friendly TV shows and films on offer. But let’s consider Weeds and the Cheech and Chong movies too obvious to mention, OK?
And no, you can’t stream stoner classics like The Big Lebowski, Half Baked, Easy Rider, Dazed and Confused, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Wet Hot American Summer, Friday, Super Troopers, or Caddyshack—sorry to harsh your buzz. Also, Doug Benson was once a jerk to my friend IRL, so you won’t find his one-trick schtick on this list.
With those caveats, up, up, and away we go.
1) Reefer Madness
This piece of anti-pot propaganda from 1936—now public domain—is ground zero for contemporary cannabis culture. Financed by an evidently hysterical church group and originally titled Tell Your Children (it’s also gone by The Burning Question, Dope Addict, Doped Youth, and Love Madness over the years), this sad attempt at stirring up a moral panic presents an implausible and horrendously acted tale in which marijuana is blamed for everything from premarital sex to burglary, rape, and murder. You know any movie that calls it “the burning weed with its roots in hell” is going to have you gasping for breath and packing another bowl.
2) An Idiot Abroad
U.K. comedian Ricky Gervais (The Office, Extras, annoying arguments about atheism on Twitter) has built his middle career around the continued and ruthless psychological probing of an extraordinary ordinary man named Karl Pilkington, who went from being the producer of Gervais’ groundbreaking podcast to a beloved public personality. Watching the travel-as-torture series An Idiot Abroad—which will make you happy you never left your couch—it’s easy to see why: he’s a totally confounding mix of willed cultural ignorance and savant-level insight into the human condition. Or maybe he just has the hottest possible takes on things like no-frills restrooms in China: “I thought this was where they made the iPod!”
3) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Any of Terry Gilliam’s dementedly surreal films fit the bill for those about to blaze: Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and Time Bandits have blown the minds of many a ganja guru. But for sheer precision of effect, this druggy opus can’t be beat. It puts any other attempt to drag Hunter S. Thompson onscreen to shame, and that’s saying something, considering Bill Murray once took his best shot. Acidheads agree that, giant lizards aside, the visuals (distorting faces, moving floors, explosions of light and color) match hallucinogenic experience to an uncanny degree. They’re so convincing, in fact, that a fan once told Gilliam he’d perfectly captured the feeling of tripping on a substance called Adrenochrome—which isn’t a psychedelic.
4) Trailer Park Boys
No weed fiend could watch this Canadian mockumentary series without craving the high-grade dope grown by Ricky, a gun-toting, malapropism-spewing career convict who just wants his piece of the pie. He and pals Julian and Bubbles hatch one dimwitted criminal scheme after another, always under the influence, and usually to the consternation of legendarily drunk trailer park supervisor Jim Lahey, who will stop at nothing in his quest to have the trio incarcerated. The crown jewel is Don’t Legalize It, the show’s third and best feature film, which finds Ricky fighting the decriminalization of marijuana—a dire threat to his black-market business. A charmingly improvised, surprisingly heartfelt, and totally obscenity-laced satire of lower-class life in a first-world country.
5) Filth
If there’s one thing stoners love as much as pot, it’s evidence that other drug addictions are much, much worse—and that’s where Irvine Welsh adaptations come in. You’ve already rewatched the thrillingly lurid Trainspotting as much as any sensible viewer can, so why not give this newer, slicker, and lesser-known movie a try? James McAvoy gets way greasy as a corrupt, coke-addled policeman in Edinburgh, Scotland, who launches a campaign of depraved harassment against almost everyone he’s ever met when the chance for a coveted promotion arises. Only connoisseurs of the blackest humor need apply.
6) Pingu
Parents who spark a one-hitter before unwinding with the kids could do a hell of lot worse than this stop-action Swiss show about an anthropomorphic family of penguins that speak exclusively in gibberish. In fact, they can probably invent some weird subtext for all these Antarctic shenanigans. Or just marvel at the meticulous craftsmanship on display.
7) Futurama
For every profound “what if” you’ve posed to your circle of friends as you wait for the joint to come back around, there’s an edifying Futurama plot. (There’s even a pair of episodes about the nature of wacky hypotheticals themselves.) Sure, this animated sci-fi series set on 31st-century Earth features a running side-gag about one character’s heroic weed intake, but the real draws are the ridiculous aliens, outlandish inventions, beer-swilling robots, exotic new planets, brain-dicing paradoxes, geeky Easter eggs, and—believe it or not—unparalleled emotional depth. Stoners will recognize one of their own in audience surrogate Fry, a slacker pizza delivery guy from the “Stupid Ages” (i.e., now) who wakes up a thousand years hence following a cryogenic mishap and pretty much just goes with the flow.
8) Jackie Brown
No one of a certain age and predilection for THC has gone unexposed to the genre-hopping violence of Quentin Tarantino, but his sole adaptation (from Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch) is as airtight as he gets. The inimitable Pam Grier in the California noir’s title role is alone worth your attention, though what bong owner could resist Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro as a mismatched and terribly dressed criminal duo? Throw in a Chris Tucker cameo, a follow-the-money caper with plenty of twists and turns, and a bikini’d Bridget Fonda as Jackson’s pot-obsessed “surfer” girlfriend—you’ve got a recipe for a great night in.
9) Twin Peaks
If you roll perfect spliffs but haven’t tried Twin Peaks, I don’t even know what to say.
10) Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood
Arguably the Wayans brothers’ finest contribution to cinema, Don’t Be a Menace brilliantly remixes the symbols, tropes, and hamfisted moral messages—which Keenen Ivory Wayans pedantically identifies at every turn—of black ghetto dramas like Do the Right Thing and Boyz n the Hood. Along with the expected gang politics, broken families, breakdancing grandmas, drive-by shootings, and racial tensions, the slapstick parody pokes fun at social scenes defined by cheap malt liquor and chronic blunts. It includes the truest distillation of the stoner’s mindset I’ve ever come across, which I humbly present in YouTube form:
11) The Inbetweeners
If getting high sometimes means embracing the lowest common denominator, then so be it. This British sitcom about four high school losers—a nerd, a spazz, a lovesick goober and a bona fide idiot—is as sophomoric as they come, and will have you spraying Mountain Dew from your nose. The English, you see, are far less squeamish when it comes to depicting adolescent sex, swearing, and drug use on TV, which makes this more of a companion piece to American Pie than… well, the failed American adaption of The Inbetweeners. The lads’ efforts to secure a bit of “puff,” as you may imagine, produces delightfully painful results.
12) Microcosmos
Imagine the best possible nature documentary you might encounter on the Discovery Channel. Now take out all the commercial breaks and brand promotions. Strip away all the narration. Replace with some classical music. Zoom the camera lens about a thousand times closer, so that a field of short grass seems like a towering forest, while insects and other invertebrates loom like dinosaurs. This is the strangely hypnotic setting that the empirical French biology lesson Microcosmos plumbs for drama, exposing a miniature world underfoot that’s every bit as rich and dangerous as our own.
13) Waking Life
I can’t front: I kind of hate Richard Linklater’s entire oeuvre. That said, if you’re into pretentious and occasionally paranoid psychobabble, this prolonged exploration of lucid dreaming and free will should absolutely be your jam. Doesn’t hurt that the whole film is rotoscoped (a trippy animation technique Linklater would use again for A Scanner Darkly, his unsung masterpiece), untethering viewers from their standard ideas of space and time.
14) Peep Show
Spending your late twenties trapped with a shitty roommate is hard, but being stuck in your own head is worse. Follow the travails of the uptight Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell) and born underachiever Jeremy Usbourne (Robert Webb) as they struggle with doomed romances, stalled careers, and the simmering desire to murder the fellow dysfunctional man-child with whom they share a cramped London flat—all of which play out from their POVs, with pitch-perfect interior monologue narration. It’s a claustrophobic saga of self-conscious lies and screamingly funny humiliations, most of which will ring familiar. This show is the textbook definition of “too real.”
15) It’s Such a Beautiful Day
Before “going viral” was a thing, animator Don Hertzfeldt’s Oscar-nominated indie short Rejected was a cult hit in every hotboxed college dorm room, titillating with outbursts of existential fear, genre-shattering effects, and uproarious non-sequiturs. This considerably bleaker feature-length effort is woven together from a trilogy of avant-garde scribblings he produced in the decade afterward, and it pulls no punches. For every giggling absurdity—a certain character “once strangled a rock in a fit of religious excitement”—there are at least ten brutal ruminations on death, disease, failure, and the loneliness of being alive. Not the lightest fare, to be sure, but for the smoker on a “spiritual journey,” there’s lots to untangle here.
16) The Twilight Zone
So you think Black Mirror is a hokey, awkward anthology of alternate realities, but you still can’t get enough? Then you’ll downright adore its Cold War inspiration. Odds are you’ve caught pieces of Twilight Zone marathons on TV over the years, but did you ever see the one where William Shatner is tormented by a gremlin (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”)? Or the one that stars Robert Redford as a friendly grim reaper (“Nothing in the Dark”)? Or the one where mannequins come to life as their department store closes (“The After Hours”)? There are plenty of duds scattered among the stone-cold classics, yet none are without a kind of goofy earnestness tailor-made to tickle a burnout’s beloved cynicism. Far out, dude.
Photo by cyclonebill/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed