Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s comedy about two broke friends in New York is as funny as anything of its kind for three seasons, and then it starts telling us what it thinks. Watch the early years first and forgive the rest.
Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer began Broad City as a web series and brought it to television on 22 January 2014 with the premise intact: two women in their twenties, in New York, with no money and no plan beyond the next few hours. Fifty half-hour episodes followed, across five seasons. For the first three of them it is as funny as anything of its kind, fast and filthy and, underneath, unusually kind. The last two are where the trouble is, and we will come to it.
The shape is an old one. Abbi (Jacobson) mops the floors of a gym and would like to be allowed to teach in it; Ilana (Glazer) has a desk at a deals website and treats it as somewhere to sleep. Each episode gives them one errand, a concert, a parcel, a lost phone, a dog, and lets the city get in the way. Seinfeld ran on the same engine with four people who could not stand each other. This runs on two who adore each other and say so. Nobody here is punished for wanting things.
Glazer plays Ilana as appetite in a crop top, crouched and grinning, forever announcing plans that fall apart in the same breath. Jacobson gives Abbi the face of a woman who has read the sign and is going to walk through the door anyway. We laughed out loud, alone, inside the first minute of the pilot, when Ilana’s face fills a video call and it takes a beat to work out what Lincoln is doing just out of frame. It is a filthy joke told with perfect manners, and it tells you what the series is in one shot.
Hannibal Buress’s Lincoln Rice, a dentist who says everything at the same mild pitch, is the funniest man on the programme because he refuses to compete with the women for volume. Arturo Castro’s Jaime, Ilana’s flatmate, delivers correction so gently it takes her an episode to notice she has been told off. John Gemberling’s Matt Bevers, the boyfriend of Abbi’s never-seen flatmate, is always on her sofa and never in enough clothes, and the running joke about him is one of the few on television that got better every year. Chris Gethard’s Todd, Abbi’s manager at the gym, is a small portrait of a man who gave up some time ago.
The direction is shared across the run by John Lee, Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and others, with Amy Poehler taking an episode, and it keeps the camera at the women’s pace: hurrying down pavements, wedged into subway cars, and splitting the screen whenever they phone each other, which is every ten minutes. The split screen is the series’ best idea. It puts them in one frame from two boroughs and lets a punchline land on a face several miles away. The writers, Aniello and Downs among them, along with Eliot Glazer, Jen Statsky and Chris Kelly, know how long a half hour is and never try to fit more than one disaster into it.
Then the fourth season arrives, in September 2017, and something has shifted. Ilana’s speeches, which used to be for Abbi, start to be for us. Jokes turn up with an opinion attached and wait to be agreed with. The fifth season, from January 2019, is a long farewell, fond and often sweet, and it is also the first time we glanced at a clock during a Broad City episode. We were not cross about it. We were sad, which for a comedy is the worse thing to be.
Start at the beginning and watch two at a time, at home, where a half hour was always meant to be watched. When Ilana begins addressing the camera instead of Abbi, you are allowed to stop. We kept going, mostly for Buress.
