High Herstory Season 2 & What The Hell Happened When We Created a TV Show About Female Stoners For a Streaming Network
What Happened To High Herstory?
We’ve been getting a few questions about what happened after the first season of High Herstory launched last year, and we wanted to share our experience as female content creators who self-funded the first season of a TV show. You can now stream the first season for free on YouTube if you haven’t seen it yet.
For context: we started the series, an episodic cannabis comedy show that tells the stories of historical women as a response to Drunk History. In a world of binge drinking and HIS-story we wanted to normalize cannabis consumption, tell stories of women, and showcase the best brands out there. We self-produced Season One (raised funds, developed, wrote, cast, shot and edited) as part of a four person team. It was honestly a lot of work….but the show ended up streaming on an OTT platform and was available on Amazon, Apple TV, Roku, etc. The series also played in dispensary TVs across the US. The show was even featured in FORBES, High Times and other media outlets who called the show “the female 4/20 version of Drunk History we’ve all been waiting for”. We were pumped that people responded to the show and excited to start producing the second season.
Then we started casting for Season Two and developed an amazing list of women in the cannabis industry to feature. However, we started to get red flags from the network and pitching to cannabis brands for funding was…exhausting to say the least. Coincidentally we were approached by a producer friend to pitch the series to larger networks…think HBO...so we put a pin in our original plans for Season Two. We ended up working with our amazing producer friend and a well-known production company to develop an entirely new version of High Herstory. We were super excited about it and to pitch it to networks! And then…the production company was bought by a larger company and the project was halted.
We continued to pitch to a few more companies and the feedback was that networks were not interested in shows around cannabis at this time. It would’ve been incredible to create Season Two with women in the cannabis industry or a more celebrity focused version for streaming and we would keep it in mind for the future if the path was clear! We have been focusing on our website, brand collabs, and are thinking of creating more YouTube content. When people ask why we don’t create more around women in history it’s because it gets the least amount of engagement on our page and we are maybe a bit burnt out on it. But never the less, we wanted to share a few things that we learned as female content creators along the way.
Our takeaways from the experience:
Creators, copyright your bigger projects!
It’s not always easy to know when to charge ahead or take a pause when a project get difficult. Ultimately we are happy that we built the series but your happiness is worth more than burn out.
Not everyone who says they will pay you will. Make your contracts bulletproof.
Community is everything. A brand’s marketing team (outside the industry) put out a similar series after we pitched them. It was totally unintentional but it would’ve been more powerful to collaborate inside of the community.
Women supporting women and “diversity” are more than just a catch phrase. Put your money where your mouth is.
You can watch the first three episodes of High Herstory on our YouTube now. Make sure to subscribe for more High Herstory video content. You can currently stream the first season on Youtube or below if you are signed in to YouTube.