Hulu’s new anthology 4X20: Quick Hits arrives April 20 with four documentary shorts, including one focused on High Times, Tom Forcade and the magazine’s role in pushing cannabis culture into the mainstream.
Jimmy Kimmel is getting into weed history.
Hulu has released the first trailer for 4X20: Quick Hits, a new anthology series executive-produced by Kimmel that will premiere April 20 with four 20-minute documentary shorts, each focused on a different corner of cannabis culture. The lineup ranges from stoner cinema to pipe culture to one very on-brand piece of this magazine’s own history.
The most relevant entry for readers here is High Times, directed by Kyle Thrash. The short tells the story of High Times magazine and founder Tom Forcade, framing the publication as part outlaw print project, part cultural accelerant and part free-speech provocation. The film follows how Forcade, driven by the Free Press movement, used cannabis smuggling to fund a magazine that would leave a lasting mark on marijuana culture.
That alone is enough to make this more than just another 4/20 content play.
The series as a whole looks designed to map a few of the strange, funny and politically charged roads that helped bring weed culture into the American mainstream. One short, Highly Unlikely, revisits Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and how an unlikely studio comedy became permanently fused with stoner mythology. Another, Bong Voyage, looks at hand-blown glass artist Jason Harris and the federal crackdown on paraphernalia during Operation Pipe Dreams. Then there’s The Legend of Ganjasaurus Rex, which goes deep on a low-budget Humboldt County cult film made as a protest against the War on Drugs.
This is not a series about sleek dispensary branding or legal-market optimism. 4X20: Quick Hits seems more interested in the weirder architecture underneath cannabis culture: the movies, magazines, folk heroes, underground businesses and acts of creative defiance that helped shape the thing before it became a licensing category and a corporate pitch deck.
Kimmel put it this way: “Christmas has a whole cable channel dedicated to holiday programming. For 4/20, we made four 20-minute-long documentaries for those who celebrate with trees of a different kind.”
That line tells you pretty clearly what kind of package this is. It knows the holiday, knows the audience and knows not to overcomplicate the premise. Still, the High Times segment may end up carrying a little more historical weight than the average 4/20 programming drop. Any serious look at cannabis culture in America eventually runs into this magazine, and into Forcade, whose contradictions were big enough to power several lifetimes of media mythology on their own.
4X20: Quick Hits premieres April 20 on Hulu, with all four shorts dropping at once. A conversation with director Kyle Thrash is in the works.
