Sure, Drunk History is great, but what about High History, and make it femme? That’s exactly what High Herstory did with their brand new series.
The new show is exactly what it sounds like; a comedy series about cannabis-consuming women telling the stories of women throughout history. Much like Drunk History, the story is told by people under the influence, and with the help of visual aids like reenactments and animation, but with a twist: the stories should be socially relevant and tell the often-silent history of women.
Started by co-founders Kendall Watkins, Jenny Joslin, and Annette Mia Flores, who also work for the video content agency and media brand Mercury Road Media, the women were already dedicated to telling cannabis stories when they had the brilliant idea to get high while doing it.
“We started our female-focused production company in New York City, and we were working with mainstream clients doing branded content, films and developing historical fiction projects for the future,” explained Joslin. “And we started to really notice that there was a lack of representation when it came to women consuming cannabis. One night, we were up late working, and we ended up saying, like, why does Drunk History have these male stories; it celebrates alcohol use, and people like it, so why can’t we have women smoking weed and telling stories from women’s history? Oh yeah, we should make that. We just got high and decided it was a great idea.”
High Herstory Is Making Its Mark
The next step was pitching networks, and while there was a definite interest in the project, back in 2016 when they first made their pitches, many did feel it was risky showing women smoking weed on TV. Not to be dissuaded by this hiccup, however, and knowing damn well they were ahead of their time, the team kept pushing and decided to make some test episodes and put them out on the internet.
“We did that and we got a lot of press, and a lot of women that were saying, ‘I want to watch this; I want to be on this show; this is really cool,” Joslin added. “So, we decided to put together an entire season. We wrapped production before COVID, thankfully, and we filmed on the weekends and whenever we could between our other clients. So, even though it started with those web series episodes, what the episodes look like now is really high production value. A lot of time and energy went into making it.
The team was also excited to create new jobs by writing stories for women, and they even partnered with a youth empowerment program in New Orleans and try to work with people from New Orleans to help create jobs and equity there. Additionally, they realized they had a major chance to change the way mainstream representation looks for women in cannabis through High Herstory.
“We knew what the statistics were, and we kind of wanted to invert it, in a sense, like flip it in the other direction,” Kendall Watkins said about the show’s diversity. “I think the exciting thing was, and the challenging thing, was that we could only do nine episodes, and you can’t even represent all the beautiful diversity in women in nine episodes, so there has to be more. I think we felt frustrated that we couldn’t tell more in the first go because there are still so many stories that haven’t been told yet.”
Luckily, we will get more, as the team is already planning on going into pre-production for Season Two this summer and start filming. They hope to unveil a new season by the end of the summer, and they have a lot of exciting ideas.
High Herstory can be streamed through whatever devices allow you to watch Social Club TV content, and luckily, the platform allows for plenty of on-screen consumption, so pull up some snacks, pack a bowl, and binge this season to get caught up on all the femme-comedy goodness.
