University of Cape Town – FAM4037F

Simone Petousis

28 June 2017

‘Our Kind of Women’:

The Relative Relevance of Girls and Broad City

“That’s how television finds its best nature: not as some kind of particular entertainment or information to please us, but as a reflection of our unique and momentary existence.”

– David Thomson in his Television: A Biography (2016: 88).

“I really think I could be the voice of my generation! Or at least a voice… of a generation.” 

–  Hannah to her parents in the Pilot episode of Girls.

“How dare you lie to your wife!

– Ilana to Abbi in ‘Game Over’ (Season 3, Episode 3 of Broad City).

HBO’s Girls(2012-7) and Comedy Central’s Broad City(2014-) are complementary studies in epochal television. Of course, this is partly because an ‘epoch’ lasts about the same time in sitcom and New York years – just less than a decade – but it’s mostly because both shows proclaim a kind of hip, self-reflexive fluency with their shared milieu that has helped attract a general notoriety and some pointed criticism far beyond what their actual viewing figures should reasonably afford them. But besides their common subject – the contemporary travails of immature twenty-something white girls – and setting – the slightly less cinematic reaches of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan – they differ wildly, and in enough particular, interesting ways to inspire the hunch that an essay which would line them up for a comprehensive comparison (i.e. this one) would eventually reveal a smattering of insights into how television narrative weaves itself into our sense of the present, as well as where good, innovative programming originates and how it’s even any longer possible. What’s problematic then about either show can thus theoretically be magnified and refracted into evidencing what is problematic about this particular Golden Age of Television as a whole[1], not to mention millenial-ridden New York. What is left out of serious consideration though by most critics with regards to these shows is how openly and continuously they criticize themselves, in as much as they are clearly premised on being self-parodying depictions of their creators’ earlier selves. Whether this self-conscious detachment in any way excuses or only further condemns their unavoidable insularity and solipsism is a question only the reception of more impartial future audiences can answer. For the moment, these are still two of the most of-the-moment shows, with so many of the next round of auteurist sitcoms – from Insecure to Chewing Gum  – inevitably following on in the frothy, white wake of their success. The form has opened up, but is it going anywhere?

What is televisually new and interesting about Girls and Broad City comes from their respective inheritances from other media. Neither of them were ostensibly first designed as tv shows and none of the three creators concerned had any previous on-air experience.[2]Lena Dunham was (and still is) primarily a memoirist and independent filmmaker whose inexhaustible subjects are her body and herself. She attended a Liberal Arts College (Oberlin) in lieu of Film School but ensured her snowballing success as a writer-director by mostly self-funding a string of progressively ambitious small features, starting with a set of campus-based shorts that gained her a modest YouTube celebrity, followed by a thesis-film, Creative Nonfiction (2009), that got her to South By Southwest, before Tiny Furniture (2010) finally won her national notoriety, a write-up in The New Yorker and the attentions of HBO and the stoner-comedy mogul Judd Apatow. (Mead, 2010) Her self-professed creative influences are all either literary or cinematic, from Joan Didion to John Cassavettes, and though she has often termed Girls a young woman’s response to (and critique of) Sex and the City, the form of its story is far closer to a serial, novelistic season-to-season arc than the latter show ever aspired to.

Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, in turn, met in 2006 in an Improv-Theater group run by the Upright Citizens’ Brigade[3]. Both had nurtured foundling dreams in their hometowns of careers in comedy but the paucity of rookie opportunities in New York reduced them to versions of the insecure entry-level jobs their eponymous characters depend on in Broad City. Needing to send home to their parents more encouraging signs of their progress, they spent weekends and holidays collaborating on a web-series prototype of the show, mining their close friendship for conversational vignettes and slapstick sketches, and very gradually gaining a devoted YouTube fanbase over the span of two ‘seasons’ and thirty-three episodes. As with Dunham, this personal industry was eventually meteorically validated by the support of an iconic star-producer; in this case, one of their heroes (and one of UCB’s founders), the great Amy Poehler, who threw her weight behind the little show by appearing in one of its last episodes (instantly doubling their average views) and then by taking charge of shopping it round the networks, which, after many false starts and years of uncertainty, finally landed them a deal with Comedy Central that has presently lasted four seasons and counting. (Paumgarten, 2014)

Just from their origin stories then, we can notice the shows’ basic similarities as easily as their natural differences. Despite their creators’ inexperience and the youth of the characters they depict, both shows are the products of many years of formative moulding. They were complete in their ideas in other mediums long before they were transplanted into their famous forms on television. And the idiosyncrasies of each of their preceding mediums, as well as the freedoms advanced by the shows’ current homes, together indicate the sources of their innovative successes. What I mean is that what Girls does particularly well is to marry the self-lacerating frankness of the literary memoir to the self-delighting frankness of HBO’s long-standing war-on-censorship, such that the show sometimes seems like a continuous parade of self-exposed sexual and emotional awkwardness contained by the presumption of a general narrative arc towards earned experience.[4]And what Broad City achieves in its own right is the preservation of the perky spontaneity and ingenuity of the web-sketch within the more substantial container of the ten-episode network sitcom, thus holding together all the transient gaggery of social media with the lasting attachments of long-haul programming. It should also not be forgotten that the obvious rarity of female-driven comedy on contemporary television (30 Rock being the honourable exception) instantly marks out both shows as bearing little revelations of unprecedented content almost episode-to-episode. In Girls this is most unavoidably seen in the perpetual presentation of Hannah’s (Dunham’s) naked body, which fits very few feminine beauty ideals but appears with a candid humility that insists on itself, damning all criticisms to the ideological rubbish bin of body-shaming. And for Broad City, it’s simply its default setting of depicting Abbi and Ilana’s bottomless friendship, of which Brigid Katz commented for The New Yorker: “The nutty intimacy of their relationship isn’t just funny; it’s radical. I can think of no other series that so persistently privileges female friendship over all other callings of adult life: jobs, money, sex, romantic partners.” (2016)  And so we can see too that the series’ clearest triumphs in innovative content primarily stem from the forces that brought the shows into being in the first place: Dunham’s will-to-self-exposure and Abbi & Ilana’s will-to-conversation. They are the things both we and the creators ultimately turn up for.

Having provided the shows’ backstories, the issue then becomes the overbearing one of relevance. Why New York? Why young white women? Why the sitcom? Why now? In a sense, these questions are doubly rhetorical: they were the shows Dunham, Jacobson and Glazer could make, and so they made them. But anomalous cultural popularity always indicates some defining insight into the zeitgeist at large, and for Girls and Broad City this is undoubtedly a shared structure of personal insularity and immaturity.[5]In tumblr’s terms, the shows are mostly about how none of the six protagonists, despite (or, perhaps, because of) their privilege, can literally even. And New York serves the function here that it has held for many generations of young creatives: being the perfect Narcissus-pool for their self-inspection.[6]The post-recession years have only re-emphasized this role too, in as much as buzz-terms like ‘the gig economy’ and ‘entrepreneurship-of-the-self’ have served to universalize the figure of the New York hustler into a defining model for the millenial creative class. Because if you make it in New York you can make it anywhere[7], the city can stand in for every other conceivable setting for the American ur-narrative of ‘making it’ – getting famous, getting the job, winning love, ‘doing the things’, just plain growing up etc. – and in an age of presiding insecurity, the depiction of the purgatory between education and adulthood, innocence and experience, dependency and self-sufficiency  becomes the essential storyline, as opposed to the ‘wanting-it-all’ narratives that undergirded those other epochal New York shows, Friends, Sex and the City and How I Met Your Mother. If the Internet too has mostly been a force on the side of atomized self-obsession, then it’s only fitting that we have as our contemporary heroines a set of digital natives who struggle continually to reconcile their online profiles with the IRL networks of friends that constitute their shows. And since social media is premised on a kind of universal contributional participation, it’s also fitting that their positions on the fringes of the creative industry (Hannah wants to write, Marnie wants to sing, Abbi wants to draw etc.) reflect in some sense the current democratization of the means of aesthetic production, in which every young person is a photographer if they use Instagram, a writer if they tweet and a musician if they have a Soundcloud account, and so on. The neoliberal culture industry’s ravenous appetite for youthful newness throws up too the paradox of these shows’ shared obsession with failure, as well as the sitcom form’s basic fuel of dysfunction: young twenty-somethings are supposed to be making the new content, the new art, but their youth condemns them to an art of mediocrity, if not a mediocre art. If anyone ‘makes it’ on Girls or Broad City then the shows are effectively over, because they are both about the continual defiance of disillusion, and nothing brings on disillusion faster than success.

This is getting away from the shows themselves of course, and it’s necessary to return to their details so as to investigate their momentous insularities further.  The forms of both shows are for the most part serendipitously complementary: Girls is satirical, dialogue-heavy and occasionally tinged with the melancholic seriousness of a hard Drama, whilst Broad City is surreal, sketch-driven and fly-by-night trivial, in the sense that its (literally) episodic storylines are anchored by the immovable object of Abbi and Ilana’s friendship.[8]Their aesthetics are more emphatically self-conscious as ‘aesthetics’ than most sitcoms have ever been (again, a sign of their digital contemporaneity), but are thus almost exactly opposed to each other: Girls uses a rigorously level camera set-up, employs creamy colour-tones and plays girl-group dream pop and acoustic neo-folk on its soundtrack, whilst Broad City is filmed on handheld, maintains low-rent lighting and proclaims an enduring love for 90’s Hip-Hop that allows its urban fetish not to ever feel too like cultural appropriation. Even their title sequences are interesting commentaries on each other: Girls flashes up the word of itself in imposing capitals, with a different shade on the colour spectrum every week for both the background and the interior of the word as well as a different opening chord ushering in the first song of the episode after the cold open, and Broad City shouts its introduction with a “Four and Three and Two and One-One” followed by a Latin rhythm and a different psychedelic animation of the title-card forming itself every time. Not to belabour the point, but the dialectic between just the shows’ signature appearances signals a divide between elegance and exuberance, fashion and vitality. It would be too simple to also claim a dynamic here between whiteness and intersectionality[9]: the looks of both shows are the results of a homemade attention to self-branding, building up a pop-cultural presence from scratch. Girls, as its literary roots imply, always means to be an overarching story, and thus sets itself firmly with the current stock of Golden Age shows on former movie channels (Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire etc.) that self-consciously seek to follow a set of characters across an unpredictable expanse of experience until their final images make a startling contrast with their first. For Girls, this is the sight of Hannah being cut off by her parents bookended with her first feelings of confidence at her accidental motherhood, and inbetween exists the shared phase of ‘Girl’hood that comprises the show. Broad City  is, again, predominantly repetitive and circular; what progress is made by Abbi and Ilana is ultimately incidental to the show’s raison d’etre, as when Abbi finally goes on a date with Jeremy, her neighbour, only to discover his sexual pettiness and unkind character, bringing her straight back to the bosom of Ilana’s consolation. But Broad City of course appears unchanging to us because it is still ongoing. We can understand at some level that Abbi and Ilana’s twenties will become as much of a contained phase as Hannah’s, Marnie’s, Jessa’s and Shoshanna’s, but for the moment there are no better selves they’re presently stopping themselves from becoming; they’re perfect for each other with each other, and this serves as a reassurance for an audience of mostly the same demographic. There is no hurry for them, or this generation, to grow up.

The great irony of this framing is that it is obvious that these shows’ successes depend on their creators wielding a mature self-consciousness the characters based on them are all obliged to lack. And this is explicitly satirized at different points in both shows, to add a further level of awareness: the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Hannah attends in Girls’ fourth season functions as a kind of built-in web forum in which her self-obsessed stories are critiqued with almost the exact same wording as the notices Lena Dunham herself received throughout the show’s run.[10]And in the second episode of Broad City’s third season, a scheme to make up Ilana’s work hours at her local co-op has the girls swap characters for an afternoon, making an instant punchline from their interchangeable cartoonishness. Abbi just practices faux-street gestures, adds a lewd grin and shouts ‘yaaas kween!’ to become Ilana while Ilana raises her voice, acts demure and stumbles over her words to become Abbi. In both cases, the minimal difference is made by the creators being just a few years older than the versions of themselves they choose to depict. And so, the New York white girl echo-chamber narrative is partially redeemed by an admirably intelligent hindsight that structures the self-knowing value of both shows. What initially appears as a headstrong assertion of the kinds of heroines demanded by the present time becomes the urgent self-satire of young performers trying to de-emphasize their own success and question their own positions.[11]This doesn’t go too far of course, but it’s important to realize that both shows ultimately implicitly depend on the comedy of their own particularity. The meta-pathos of Hannah’s line from Girls’ first episode about her potential to be ‘a voice of a generation’ is that it is of course true, but that it is the minor tragedy of her privilege that she can’t aspire to be more than that without appearing arrogant or unrepresentative or simply fake. Dunham meant ‘Girls’ as a descriptive, not a totalizing title, (Blair, 2012) but her own success condemned her to being taken up for the perceived ignorance of her writing, apparently asserting her predominantly whitewashed experience of Brooklyn and environs as an authoritative one. But shows as self-undermining and generally satirical as Girls depend on a currency of contempt that arguably can’t simultaneously be beholden to the more self-serious demands of fair representation. Dunham mostly depicts the whiteness of her half-Wasp, half-Jewish background because she knows how to mock it, and she knows the way it tends to isolate itself from any more progressive inclusivity. It’s clear too even just from the tone of the ‘voice-of-a-generation’ quote that Dunham was fully aware from the beginning that her show would be a show about young femininity and not the last word on it. Indeed, this is the idea behind comparing it here to Broad City, a show that presents and exposes so much of what Girls fails to represent about contemporary New York. It succeeds far better at being inconspicuously inseparable from the moment of its making, and makes a feature of its diversity and progressive stance to boot.[12]But, as mentioned, it’s also overwhelmingly true to Abbi and Ilana as characters, and not as representative women. By their very presences they demonstrate how millenial women can now be depicted – as having sex-drives, as stoners, as inextricable friends etc. – but they are primarily a double-act and a representation of a real friendship built on a self-sufficiency that makes questions of timeliness irrelevant. And, as with Girls, it is this creative independence-of-mind that has ensured the show’s rise from being the product of two young women as scrappy and ordinary as ‘Abbi’ and ‘Ilana’ into the cult-viral phenomenon it has become on the eve of its fourth season.

Ultimately, television maintains its aura of social relevance by the mere fact of its continuity. It is what ‘everyone’ can talk about, because individual shows play over long enough time-spans that they can even react to their audiences’ reactions to them. Thus, for any particular creator to command broadcasting time, let alone be the center of the conversation for longer than a weekend, is the result of privilege, and for Dunham, Jacobson and Glazer this is simply the opportunity afforded them not only to develop their own material privately but to see it developed to its fullness in front of millions of viewers. What saves them from the ignominy of self-contentment and fatal narcissism is the humility of their self-depictions. To have got to the point of narrativizing and parodying a dysfunctional version of yourself for a substantial audience is to already have succeeded far beyond the inherent capacities of that self. However, at the same time, it is a cunning method of disalienating yourself from that audience by showing that but for the grace of self-distance, you remain the everywoman character you’ve made an industry of mocking. Thus, the shared message of Girls and Broad City is altogether liberatory: anyone’s self-experience can be transformed into popular comedy if they’re just able to develop their own ‘show’ in their own time.  The fact that the television industry has to accept the success of white feminist creators first before this can become a general principle – seen in the subsequent popularity of Issa Rae’s Insecure and Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum– is the industry’s own failing. I personally don’t blame Dunham and co. for taking advantage of their privilege, as long as the form they’ve created with it has served to inspire more diverse voices as opposed to just reinforcing their hegemony, which it patently has. This is perhaps the clearest sign of all vis-à-vis the shows’ timeliness: they’ve been partly responsible for the sitcom form’s progress. The inclusion of more candid female voices and bodies in our programming incites the further diversification of the medium itself, making it alternately more literary, more hip, more intelligent, more self-aware, and, ultimately, just more funny. They are shows to put in a time-capsule so as to judge them against their descendents. In this way, the most present-tense shows are the ones which point most urgently to the future of entertainment.

Word Count: 3988  

Reference List:

Blair, E. 2012. ‘The Loves of Lena Dunham’. From The New York Review of Books. Accessible: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/loves-lena-dunham/

Katz, B. 2016. ‘The quiet radicalism of Broad City’ from The New York Times Live Blog. Accessible: http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2016/02/25/the-quiet-radicalism-of-broad-city/

Mead, R. 2010. ‘Downtown’s Daughter: Lena Dunham cheerfully exposes her privileged life’. From The New Yorker. Accessible: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/15/downtowns-daughter

New York Times Critics. 2017. ‘6 Ways ‘Girls’ Changed Television. Or Didn’t.’ Accessible: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/arts/television/girls-season-six.html

Nussbaum, E. 2016. ‘Laverne & Curly The slapstick anarchists of “Broad City.”’ From The New Yorker.Accessible: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/broad-citys-slapstick-anarchists

– 2017. ‘The Cunning “American Bitch” Episode of “Girls”’. From The New Yorker. Accessible: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-cunning-american-bitch-episode-of-girls 

Paumgarten, N. 2014. ‘Id Girls: The Comedy Couple Behind Broad City’ from The New Yorker. Accessible: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/id-girls

Thomson, D. 2016. Television: A Biography. Thames and Hudson: New York.

[1]And maybe, hopefully, also what’s problematic about the word ‘problematic’, a term too fatigued by now to even be a cliché.

[2]This was true too of Seinfeld, another great New York sitcom with a half-Jewish sensibility, whose creators (Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David) had written almost nothing but stand-up scripts before they piqued NBC’s interest.

[3]A sketch-comedy troupe and training centre that has counted among its alumni most of the Saturday Night Live cast from the last twenty years.

[4]“Ms. Dunham didn’t invent the idea of mining personal experience for humor and pathos. But she did bring some of the confessionalism of the literary memoir and the ground-level emotional naturalism of mumblecore cinema into serial television.” – A.O. Scott in ‘6 Ways Girls Changed Television. Or Didn’t’ by The New York Times (2017)

[5]You can see this as the understandable result of the aforementioned origins of both shows: they were both fully formed in the echo-chamber reception of the creators’ previous work so we shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t reach too far beyond their personal lives and concerns.

[6]It’s not a coincidence that almost all the valuable articles and interviews I could research for this essay came from either The New Yorker or The New York Times. The insular perpetual motion device of New York media fueling New York’s own self-obsession as a city along with New Yorkers’ obsessions with themselves is something to inspire awe and trepidation. 

[7]This creates the New York paradox of its synecdochally representing all cities whilst simultaneously remaining idiosyncratic, even eccentric, or at least the home of far fewer sell-outs and far less televisual dreck than Los Angeles per se, which contributes to the air of hipster haughtiness in most outside depictions of the present generation of Brooklynites. 

[8]Katz again: “Broad City doesn’t indulge in much hand-wringing over its protagonists’ narcissism. That’s just how they are, and it works, because their world is insular. Nothing goes right for Abbi and Ilana, but it doesn’t really matter. Regardless of how spectacularly they mess up, they end each episode hanging out, smoking blunts, enjoying each other’s company.” (2016) It’s worth adding here too that what the title apparently connotes to the real Abbi and Ilana is New York’s diversity, the fact that they live in a city of ‘fuller’, broader people than elsewhere, which defies the more traditional interpretation of it just being a city of broads, or one-dimensional women.

[9]“Visually, and in terms of their friendships, the world of “Broad City” is racially inclusive. For a while, this diversity was regularly used as a snotty wedge against HBO’s “Girls,” as if Abbi and Ilana were the pure Elizabeth Warren to Lena Dunham’s tainted Hillary Clinton. But, in fact, Abbi and Ilana, just like Hannah Horvath, aren’t generic young women: they’re college-educated white kids from the Northeast, artsy urbanites who aren’t rich but also aren’t poor, even if they can’t afford much.” (Nussbaum, 2016)

[10]“Of course, that other gray area, the one between Lena and Hannah (and Aura, her character in “Tiny Furniture”; and Ella, from Dunham’s college-era film “Creative Nonfiction”; and Anna, the character that Hannah writes about when she’s in Iowa, who “has to eat every two hours or she faints”), is a big part of the show’s dark-comic engine—just as it has been in every great sitcom throughout TV history, from “I Love Lucy” to “Louie” to “Seinfeld” to “Roseanne.” TV sitcoms are machines that turn private humiliations into something big and wild and public. Through Hannah, Dunham gets to paint a picture of her own house and then paint herself into it.” (Nussbaum, 2017)

[11]“[I]t’s the scope of the comedy that takes [Girls] beyond a show merely of the white and the spoiled: It’s about being white and spoiled and self-concerned. And in demanding a dignity for its competing narcissists, “Girls” practices a kind of humor that’s mostly gone from our movies and yet still feels fresh for episodic television.” – Wesley Morris in ‘6 Ways Girls Changed Television. Or Didn’t’ by The New York Times (2017)

[12]But not too progressive sadly, hence Hillary Clinton’s appearance on the show in the middle of the third season.