‘Broad City’ Review: “Co-Op"
Kate Frydman ’16 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
Broad City has a strong, familiar narrative quality that often serves to demonstrate its Seinfeldian dissent. Like Seinfeld, the characters don’t necessarily grow episode to episode, the drama is minimal, the stakes low and the characters are a parody of the familiar without feeling fake. In trying to sell potential fans on the show, devotees have to bite their tongues lest they recite the tagline supposedly used to sell Seinfeld back in the 90’s.
Broad City is a show about best friends, who have adventures, smoke weed and have sex. In other words, it’s a show about nothing.
The second premise is ‘The girls have their respective adventures, and reunite to exchange information on their personal growth.’ The advantage to exploring this template is that it allows the viewer to see that the girls do have their own lives, which they manage to wreak havoc on without feeding off each other.
This week’s episode saw the latter story structure being explored, which meant Jacobson doing an episode-long Ilana impression that couldn’t have been done if the girls had been together for the episode. When Ilana fails to reach her co-op hours at her local organic grocery shop, she asks Abbi to fill in as her, rather than for her- the co-op doesn’t switch shifts- while Ilana goes to the doctor. It was obviously a real challenge for Jacobson to try and inhabit the vocabulary and body language of Glazer’s character, and makes you realize just how other worldly Ilana really is. Glazer makes playing her parodied-self look so easy. Abbi pursuing a boy as Ilana and trying to talk up her “friend” Abbi is a part of the episode that you end up caring less about than Abbi taking on a persona that she clearly can’t handle.
When the girls reunite, and Abbi introduces Ilana to her new crush as “Abbi,” Ilana gets a chance to show what her Abbi impression is made of. Because Abbi is the straight woman of the show, an impression of her is presumably more challenging as she’s pretty lacking in abstract quirkiness. Instead, Ilana throws in something about Abbi’s Jewishness, and her giant labia. Job well done.
Overall Episode Grade: B+