“Try this now,” said Ben Sinclair, co-creator and star of High Maintenance, gesturing with his coffee mug. It was coffee with maca root—in a fancy, smartphone-controlled mug that stays at the temperature it’s programmed to. Sinclair and co-creator Katja Blichfled informed me that it’s supposed to be good for vitality, and maybe also balances out female hormones. It tasted good, if grittier than I expected—and warm, which is the point. Sinclair loves this new device, a gift from a producer. “When you forget about your coffee, and then you’re like, oh yeah, and then you take a sip, and it’s just as hot as when you started? It’s truly delightful,” he said.

“Honestly, I’m a little—that is my thing. I’m always freaking out about temperatures for my beverages,” Blichfeld added.

“I thought she got them for both of us,” Sinclair replied, apologetically.

Sinclair and Blichfeld were in the midst of editing the third season of High Maintenance, which debuts Sunday night, in their writing space in Crown Heights. The second season of the show has a 100 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and moved critics to write praise like “poetic without being pretentious,” “stellar,” and “TV’s most human show.” Sinclair was wearing a fabulous leather cap, and Blichfeld was in a bright orange sweater paired with black and gold Nikes. Both were exploring coffee alternatives—she’s switched, for the time being, to matcha, which Sinclair did while filming the third season. He told her to look into a matcha-collagen powder, and she took this advice eagerly; she trusts him.

Blichfeld and Sinclair met in 2009 at a barbecue and were drawn together partly due to their shared love of smoking weed. They launched their Web series, High Maintenance, on Vimeo in 2012, the same week that Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational cannabis. High Maintenance became a cult hit. Then, in 2015, the creators snagged an HBO deal. But the series signaled the death knell for the couple’s romantic relationship, too. They made the decision to end their marriage on Election Day 2016, shortly after their first HBO season—a shaky but prophetic set of episodes—finished airing. But the pair has made an exceptional commitment to conscious uncoupling, speaking candidly with their crew and with the press about their experience.

As their relationship has changed, the show has, too. In its earliest form, High Maintenance was a slice-of-life series anchored by Sinclair’s lead performance as the Guy, an itinerant drug dealer perpetually wearing a bike helmet. As the show expanded, its characters began to reappear in different episodes, to make up a part of the Guy’s far-flung constellation of regular clients. And by the time High Maintenance made it to HBO, the Guy himself had become less of a cipher; audiences began to see more of his personal life. Sinclair and Blichfeld had not avoided putting their own experiences into the show in the past—the Ditmas Park-set episode “Sufjan” was inspired by their own move—but it was new to see the Guy echo so much of Sinclair’s biography as the character evolved.

Sinclair acquired an old RV and began spending some time upstate; so did the Guy, who begins Season 3 in the woods. In the premiere, we see him at a verdant retreat, floating on a lake, smoking a joint. Sinclair and Blichfeld are the show’s regular directors, and shooting in a non-urban space electrified them both; the camera follows the Guy in and out of murky lake water, then floats on the surface with him, watching clouds of smoke disappear into the foliage.