The modern comedy in a nutshell (or a pill, or a brownie).

Few types of shows capture the relational quality of television better than a sitcom. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, comedy on television was a reprieve from the ever-maturing dramatic side of the small screen. You hung out with Friends. You complained along with Seinfeld. You followed the revolving door of relationships on How I Met Your Mother. You checked in for work at The Office or the Parks and Recreation department. Comedy in decades past was comforting. It was familiar and rhythmic and consistent. In the 2010s, it became the opposite.

Until Seinfeld, the most important sitcom this side of Cheers, comedies found universality through, well, universality. Even as Larry David and Jerry used Seinfeld to spout their personal petty takes on modern life, most other network sitcoms trafficked in broad humor. Roseanne, Friends, Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond, Full House, and Home Improvement found enormous success by casting their comedic nets as wide as possible[1]. They told jokes that applied to the majority (re: white, working-to-middle-class adults over 35) and they dealt with topics generally considered acceptable. Until Friends went off the air in the early 2000s, we were in the prime of Very Special Episodes and laugh tracks.

But as we said, of all the great 90s comedies, Seinfeld garnered the most acclaim and earned the grandest legacy in part because it had a specific point of view. Nitpicky protestors might say that as “the show about nothing,” Seinfeld didn’t have a point of view, but ironically, that was the show’s point of view: to be as purposeless as possible. Really, Seinfeld existed to bitch and moan about things that didn’t really matter, like social quirks and modern inconveniences and the general annoyances that come with having other people interrupt your personal life. Seinfeld was about “nothing” in the same way little kids say “nothing” happened at school on a given day; something happened, it just wasn’t worth reflecting about.

Seinfeld was a mode of expression for Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, and while their expressions were profoundly unimportant, their POV-driven approach to writing the show birthed a model that would inspire tons of comedians to make their shows, too. That’s how the snowball started rolling downhill toward the sitcoms we saw in the 2010s. That’s how something like Broad City came to life.

Through the late 00s, there were two main paths to making your own sitcom: 1) You came up as a writer on a titanic comedy show like Seinfeld, Saturday Night Live, or The Simpsons before using your Hollywood connections to climb the ladder and become a showrunner, or 2) Your early individual work saw a surprising amount of success and you leveraged it into a deal with a production company.

The first path was more common. It’s how Mike Schur went from Saturday Night Live to The Office, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Place, how Conan O’Brien went from The Simpsons to late night, how Donald Glover went from 30 Rock to Atlanta, and how Alec Berg went from Seinfeld to Barry. This shouldn’t be surprising; it’s the corporate ladder.

The second path was less common, but still somewhat typical in Hollywood. Lena Dunham worked her way to Girls after HBO noticed her award-winning indie film Tiny Furniture. ABC ordered Fresh Off the Boat after Eddie Huang’s book became a hit[2]. Dan Harmon struggled through a bunch of failed TV shows before he wrote the big-budget animated flick Monster House in 2006 and turned that into the chance to make Community in 2009. Both this path and its parallel course require aspiring creatives to prove themselves. You have to be a known quantity before the industry hands you the keys to your own show.

Broad City didn’t follow either of those formulas. On the contrary, Broad City was born out of failure more than success.

In 2009, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, co-creators of Broad City, were barely hanging on to performance gigs at the Upright Citizens Brigade improv comedy troupe in New York City. Like many young improvisers, their goal was to make UCB’s main roster, but after years of slogging their way through the minor leagues of the troupe, they still hadn’t been called up. Glazer and Jacobson were the only two women on their practice squad—a fact that now seems preposterously poetic—and they were staring at a dead end.

The pair knew they had rare comedic chemistry. When they remember their meet-cute story in interviews, they talk about it like a sparks-flying moment of revelation, a mind-melding “this person understands” connection that was instantly special and important. They leaned into it, and after their numerous failures at UCB, they turned to one another as an escape route. They decided to launch a web series together called Broad City, a series of video shorts written by and starring themselves about two young women struggling to mature in New York City.

In those days, a web series was a foreign concept. YouTube in the late aughts was only a few years old, more known for SNL bootlegs and accidental caught-on-camera triumphs[3] than original, intentional internet projects. The first web-based season of Broad City is indicative of the platform. It’s definitely distinct and funny, but it’s also very…homemade. It looks like a YouTube upload. You can’t really blame it, either. As opposed to today’s medium-fluid web series, which function almost exactly like traditional television shows, the YouTube that housed Broad City in 2009 and 2010 felt like it could only contain a certain style. That is to say, it was a place for amateurs.

Broad City wasn’t a huge hit by “viral” internet standards, only garnering about 25,000 views per episode even after Jacobson and Glazer upped their production game in the second season[4]. Still, the show found a lane. The 2- to 5-minute episodes captured an absurdist version of New York and dissected the micro-dilemmas of living there in detail, with plotlines devoted to minutiae like asking a homeless man if he can break a 20-dollar bill or having to continue a conversation with a minor acquaintance because you’re riding the same subway car. It was clever. You could even derisively say it was “cute,” though that term would do a disservice to the insane amount of work Jacobson and Glazer were doing behind the scenes to put Broad City online at all[5].

Broad City’s online viewership numbers weren’t eye-popping, but they were enough to earn Jacobson and Glazer some of the attention they had been denied in the comedy scene, and this opened the door to their lucky break. The right person was watching.

For their second-season finale, Jacobson and Glazer[6] wanted to find an exclamatory punctuation mark to cap the project. Through their friends at UCB they dug up information on one of their comedy idols and reached out to none other than Amy Poehler, asking if she’d like to make a guest appearance in the episode[7].

Turns out, Poehler was already a fan of Broad City, and she not only agreed and made the cameo, she ultimately accepted a follow-up request from Jacobson and Glazer to executive produce a television version of Broad City. For Jacobson and Glazer, Poehler’s attachment was the girls’ golden ticker. They quit their day jobs and flew to Los Angeles and began shopping Broad City around. After the show was picked up and dropped by FX, Comedy Central committed to the series in 2011.

Broad City’s path to the bigtime became representative of how the internet era affected the discovery of new talent. Not only did the show mature on the internet in a way we hadn’t even seen with Funny or Die or other web-based productions, it brought TV production methods to the internet.

Moreover, Broad City’s endorsements came from untraditional sources in the industry. Remember all those comedy names in the introduction of this essay? All those showrunners are men, and almost all those shows were built exclusively by men. Maybe the start of the 2010s weren’t exactly a “what is she doing here?” sort of environment for women in comedy, but the era was a time when it was rare for women to be in positions where they could elevate, promote, and advance other women. Poehler was in a unique place, and to her immense credit, she took bold and risky opportunities to leverage it.

Because let’s make another thing clear: Broad City was an out-and-out risk. From its very first episode—the show premiered in 2014—Broad City flaunted a galling, brash, hyper-specific sense of humor, one that found glee in profanity and pleasure in discomfort. It walked with its chest out. It flexed its femininity. It flaunted its millennial-ness. It bleeped out tons of words and blurred out tons of nudity and burst at the seams with disgraceful indignities. It was excellent.

The pilot’s opening scene might as well have been a thesis statement. Jacobson and Glazer, playing heightened versions of themselves[8], video chat one another to discuss their plans for the day. Ilana is eager to go out, but Abbi wants to stay home, eat chicken cashew stir fry, and finish season one of Damages[9]. We see Abbi put a post-it note on her vibrator reminding herself to masturbate later, and at the end of the call, the camera draws back on Ilana’s end of the call to reveal she’s been having sex the entire time (with comedian Hannibal Burress, in a really, really funny supporting role).

For Broad City’s five seasons from 2014 to 2019, that was its MO. Where every other show would have cut the camera or inserted an implication or left things to your imagination, Broad City zoomed in and kept things rolling. Women on television hadn’t been seen this up-close before, at least not this consistently and completely. That applies to how Broad City explored all the realities (positive and negative) of the female body, sure, but it also applies to how it presented female desires, insecurities, and relationships. The result of this intense examination wasn’t a show that swapped women in to play male roles, but showed three-dimensional, complete women doing things that until Broad City were only assumed to reflect the sensibilities of men. To put it another way, popular culture for years made you wonder if girls pooped. Broad City confirmed that, in fact, they shit.

There are two misconceptions about Broad City. The first comes from its raunchy sense of humor. There’s a backwards dialogue in comedy that says whenever women are doing something gross or undignified, the joke is a woman is doing it[10]. In most comedies (particularly those of the 00s—considering movies like The Hangover or Knocked Up or Anchorman), women are the ones wagging their finger as the man-children run amok. It’s unfair, and it’s exponentially more unfair to use that conception as a lens to view female comedy. Broad City isn’t just a pair of women playing male roles. It’s a pair of women playing female roles that until then hadn’t been on screen.

Amy Poehler explained this well in an interview with The New Yorker[11]. She told the magazine: “The rule [in television] is: Specific voices are funny and chemistry can’t be faked. There aren’t enough [women like Abbi and Ilana] on TV—confident, sexually attractive, self-effacing women, girlfriends who love each other the most…Women always have to be the eye rollers as the men make the mess. We didn’t want that. Young women can be lost, too.”

It’s a good bridge to the second misconception about Broad City: its perceived kinship to concurrent comedies, particularly HBO’s Girls, which premiered two years before and was also about young women in New York City. Both Broad City and Girls are the singular visions of their female leads—in Girls’ case, creator and star Lena Dunham[12]—and they both focus on the same stage of life, but each show’s POV couldn’t be more different. Broad City and Girls, it can be argued, have opposite sensibilities.

Consider how each show treats the female body. Girls broke ground in its early days because it featured nude female bodies that didn’t meet conventional beauty standards and displayed them as desirable. Broad City broke ground because it showed its leads farting and having their periods and using the bathroom and displayed all of that as really freaking disgusting, because guess what? It was really freaking disgusting. Girls preached (valuably, oftentimes) about how society was corrupting our view of women. Broad City was way ahead of that conversation. Broad City assumed you were in a place where you could watch a woman smuggle weed through airport security in her vagina and think it was hilarious because, yo, when that girl is masking the smell of that weed with a pair of pants stained by her period blood, it’s pretty damn hilarious.

Broad City treated its viewers with more intelligence than Girls. It doesn’t present Abbi and Ilana as gross women, just women who fall into gross scenarios sometimes common to other women. It’s a light but important nuance.

In other words, Broad City is free from whimsy. Other shows about people in this life stage are aspirational, from the preposterous apartments on Friends to the non-stop bar nights on How I Met Your Mother to the cosmopolitan existences on Master of None. But Broad City maintains a through line of struggle, poverty, desperation, dissatisfaction, and confusion. The situations it presents are extreme, but its point of view feels true to the universal experience of being young[13].

At the show’s height, Jacobson and Glazer sat down for an interview with actor Ellen Page, who remarked how Broad City’s perpetual uber-reality—the characters’ struggle for money, small-time triumphs, and baby-step progressions—didn’t just make the show feel more relatable for her, but made it funnier. In response, Jacobson said: “The web series came out of [the two of us] feeling very powerless in becoming what we wanted to become, not being able to get parts or get seen or heard as a performer or comedian.”

Broad City’s origin as a let’s-do-it-ourselves web show relates directly to its central thesis. It’s a show about two women whose friendship carries them through extremified versions of typical young-person-in-New-York hardships. Jacobson and Glazer sustained one another through their real-life early-life failures, and as Broad City moved from season to season, it examined, in terrific fashion, how their relationship informed and clashed against their urges to mature, differentiate, and find happiness together and apart.

Broad City did what no other show could do because it came from a different place than every other show. Its central friendship, both on screen and in real life, is essential to that truth.

Today, shows with the same ingredients as Broad City are a dime a dozen. Jacobson and Glazer were a unique comedic cocktail, but even their niche humor has imitators in today’s crowded TV landscape. Let alone the spike in TV shows by and about women, most modern sitcoms in general are built to reflect their creators, and those shows almost all have the same lack the compromise and reserve Broad City showed off in its pilot.

The list of shows about comedians playing off-brand versions of themselves is exhausting, too: Master of None, Maron, Louie[14], Better Things, Crashing, Ramy, even Nathan For You in its own way[15]. This leads to shows like Aidy Bryant’s Shrill, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle’s PEN15, Donald Glover’s Atlanta, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, in which a major comedic voice aims at a subject or theme adjacent to themselves. These shows are less about the comedian-as-star and more about the comedian-as-thinker, and like Broad City, they pack ideas behind the laughs (though many of them are more ideas-forward, for better and worse).

Peak TV diversified the array of shows available to audiences, and that diversification lead to audiences identifying with particular micro-tastes. In comedy, that fragmentation resulted in shows that accommodated hyper-specific viewpoints, and when that lead to something like Broad City, it was proof that specificity was sometimes the best path to the universality so many older sitcoms tried to reach.

It’s often said the best jokes come from ideas everyone can understand. In the past, comedies found the best joke by casting their net wide, but today, they find it by looking at the world through a straw. Thanks to its downtrodden path to success, its brilliant creators, its bold supporters, and its jaw-dropping execution, Broad City found incredible things on the other end of its straw. Of course, it probably stuck that straw in all kinds of other places, too, but maybe now isn’t the time to think about that.

[1] Of this group, Frasier was probably the kookiest, but even that show never went so strange as to turn people away. Its joke mechanism was still very much “set-up/punchline” in what now feels telegraphic and unsubtle.

[2] Huang has distanced himself from the series, now in its fifth season, due to creative differences, but he’s still credited as the show’s producer.

[3] The best of these is without question “The Greatest Freakout Ever,” in which a kid throws a tantrum following the cancellation of his World of Warcraft account and mimics shoving a remote control up his butt.

[4] While Jacobson and Glazer ran around New York City guerilla-shooting their first season on almost no budget, they ran the show’s second online season like real showrunners. They wrote out production schedules and managed a tiny public relations blitz and employed friends (at a rate of about $100 per episode) to work cameras and direct. For something appearing on YouTube, this evolved model was really ahead of its time, and its likely if Broad City began today it would be an internet darling. At the time, however, people just didn’t expect to see this kind of thing on YouTube, so it’s unlikely anyone was on YouTube even looking for something like Broad City. The closest comparison is probably Funny or Die, the internet sketch platform headlined by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. But even those guys saw the internet as a place they could just screw around. Jacobson and Glazer bet the house on it as their ticket to success.

[5] To pay the bills while they made the web show, Jacobson and Glazer worked day jobs at a shady cosmetics company (the inspiration for telemarketing/ecomm company Deals Deals Deals on the TV show), where they’d G-Chat during their shifts about the Broad City episode in production.

[6] This is sort of a strange note, but it speaks to the professionalism and self-regard of these women: When people refer to Jacobson and Glazer informally in public, the two women have a stated preference for the order being “Abbi and Ilana.” They’ve been asked this at formal Q&As and have given this answer as an instruction. It says a lot, and not in a “who’s more important” sense.

[7] Amy Poehler is the co-founder of UCB. She’s also, in case you’re less culturally attuned, one of the leading comedic voices of the new millennium, serving as one of Saturday Night Live’s greatest cast members and Weekend Update hosts before thriving as the lead of Parks and Recreation on NBC. These days, Poehler is behind the camera more, making her directorial debut with the Netflix original feature Wine Country in 2019, but moreover producing tons of quality shows, many of which put a spotlight on lesser-known or less-represented comedic voices. Aside from Broad City, she’s EP’d Russian Doll, Difficult People, and—delightfully—the Nickelodeon cartoon The Mighty B!

[8] Though their characters were always drawn as similar to the people we eventually met on the show, Jacobson and Glazer initially named their leads Carly and Evelyn, respectively. It was only in the later stages of development they named their characters after themselves.

[9] Great show, for what it’s worth.

[10] Plenty of female comedians have reversed this conversation in the 2010s, including Kristen Wiig, Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer (for a while, at least), Melissa McCarthy, Ali Wong, and Rebel Wilson. The distinction we’ve come to learn, especially from more physical female comedians, is there’s a difference between a vagina joke that derives humor from the person telling it (“LOL—she’s not supposed to say that!”) and a vagina joke that dervies humor from, well, vaginas (take your pick from either of Ali Wong’s excellent stand-up specials, Baby Cobra or Hard Knock Wife). Part of Broad City’s uniform excellence is how it never stooped to the former and always had precision behind its graphic punchlines.

[11] Impressed?

[12] Few stars had a more complicated decade than Dunham, who rose bright and hot as Girls became an HBO staple, but experienced a long, slow plummet to earth as her numerous attempts at millennial woke-ness fell flat among the public. Remember when she wrote in her memoir about how she touched her little sister when they were kids and passed it off as sexual exploration? Remember when Girls was accused of being too white and she cast Donald Glover as her own boyfriend for two episodes? Remember when she accused NFL wide receiver Odell Beckham, Jr. of misogyny because he didn’t recognize her at the 2016 Met Gala? Remember when she tried to kiss Brad Pitt without his consent on the red carpet for Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood? This was once an industry wunderkind, ladies and gentlemen, and we actually left stuff off that list.

[13] And in further contrast to its peers, Broad City didn’t change even as Jacobson and Glazer’s public profiles saw a boost with the show’s success. Again, when Dunham was criticized for Girls’ lack of diversity, she cast one of the most popular young black men in America as her own character’s romantic interest. The only times Broad City let external circumstances impact its story are a) when the show decided to go off the air, an external decision every show has to make, and b) the reveal of Abbi’s bisexuality in the fifth season. The summer before, Abbi Jacobson had come out as bisexual through her book, I Might Regret This.

[14] …it just at least has to be mentioned, you know?

[15] Nathan For You is another one of those near-Touchstones. It missed the boat because, actually, it’s so excellent at accomplishing its hyper-specific goal that it doesn’t really represent anything beyond its own greatness. Of course, the show does point to a lot of deep-rooted, uncomfortable things about modern life, and those things would make for pages and pages of analysis, but the creation, execution, and legacy of Nathan For You doesn’t really interact with anything else in comedy. If this project was about discussing the Best Things of the Decade, it’s almost without question Nathan For You would make the cut, but that’s not totally what we’re doing here, so instead, we have to just stand and gawk at it like it’s a comet shooting by us on earth, accepting that nothing was even close to it and that, because of its complete alien-ness, we might not even be able to fully understand it until another 10 years have passed.