Abbi Jacobson

The joke that tells you what Broad City is arrives inside its first minute. Ilana's face fills a video call, and it takes a beat to work out what Lincoln is doing just out of frame. We laughed out loud, alone, and the reason was the manners of it: a filthy joke delivered as politely as a thank-you note. That is Abbi Jacobson's comedy in one shot, and it is worth saying at the start that she did not direct it. Her hand is in the writing, in the timing, and in Abbi herself, whom Jacobson plays as a woman who has read the sign and is going to walk through the door anyway.

She and Ilana Glazer met at the Upright Citizens Brigade and made Broad City as a web series between 2009 and 2011 before bringing it to television on 22 January 2014. Fifty half-hour episodes followed across five seasons, with Jacobson as co-creator, writer, executive producer and performer. For three of those seasons it is as funny as anything of its kind, fast and filthy and unusually kind underneath; nobody is punished for wanting things. The last two seasons start telling us what they think, and it is in those two, the fourth and fifth, that Jacobson took the director's chair, for four episodes including Witches and House-Sitting (both 2017).

We cannot honestly tell you those episodes look different from the ones around them, and that cuts both ways. The show's look and pace were set well before she directed any of it, in large part by Lucia Aniello, who directed many episodes and gave the series its habit of letting one small errand swallow a whole afternoon. Jacobson's episodes sit inside that house style rather than pushing against it, which is good manners in a director of television and makes them hard to judge as a director's work. She has said, "I tend to amplify things that I'm insecure about in my own life." That is the writer talking, and on the evidence the director exists to serve the writer.

Since the series ended she has co-created, written and starred in A League of Their Own (2022), a period series drawn from the film, and done a good deal of voice work in animation, including Disenchantment and The Mitchells vs. the Machines. We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to. What we can say is that every directing credit she holds belongs to a project she also created, and the second half of Broad City, where all of them fall, is the half we liked less.

So the honest position is this. We know what Jacobson is like on the page and on screen, and we would recommend the first three years of Broad City to anyone who has ever been broke in a city with a friend. Behind the camera she remains an open question, and the way to answer it is a script with somebody else's name on it. On the evidence of those early seasons, we would like her to try.