Funny Girl(s): Broad City and GIRLS

Over the past month or two, I have become completely and utterly obsessed with the new Comedy Central program Broad City.  Have you guys seen it yet?  If you haven’t, I recommend that you run, don’t walk.  It is HILARIOUS.  Basically, Broad City is about two early 20s BFFs living in Brooklyn, having crappy jobs, dating people, and just generally going about their lives.  If I told you it was about four girls instead of two, you’d say I was talking about GIRLS, right?  Naturally, because all shows/movies about women have to be compared to one another, there has been a lot of comparison about Broad City and GIRLS.  I know several people who have deep reservations about GIRLS who just adore Broad City.  I have a few things to say about this.

First, the two shows are really, really different.  Yes, they’re both about women around the same age living in the same city.  But GIRLS and Broad City each have extremely different points of view and, I think, aims.  GIRLS is a show that is primarily about what happens when you graduate from college, particularly what happens between friends.  The central relationship of the show is, in my view, Hannah and Marnie.  GIRLS explores what happens when two people who were up-each-other’s-butts besties in college leave the campus environment and start living in a different way and discover, hey, maybe I don’t like you as much as I thought I did.  And it’s about trying to become the person that you think you are or want to be once your safety net has been removed.  GIRLS is a funny show, but it’s not just a comedy.  It makes me laugh almost every week, but it also makes me think and cringe and sometimes it makes me sad.  It’s a show with ambition beyond just LOLs.  Broad City is also primarily about a post-collegiate friendship, but it’s not, at least so far, about the breakdown of that central relationship.  In fact, it’s not really about anything per se, beyond a day in the lives of Abbi and Ilana, besties extraordinaire.  The show does definitely poke fun at certain things–particularly things about New York and New York culture that just SLAY me–but it’s mostly just there to make you laugh your ass off at the antics these two get into.  And it is WILDLY successful at that, let me just tell you.  But at least to this point, Broad City doesn’t really seem to be trying to say the things that GIRLS is saying or make the points that GIRLS is making.  GIRLS judges its characters, often pretty harshly, for their assorted poor choices.  Broad City just laughs at the situations Abbi and Ilana find themselves in.  Two totally different, totally valid, and in my opinion, totally awesome, ways of framing a television show about young women in New York City.

Speaking of New York, one of the things that does strike me as a valid point of comparison between the two shows is the setting.  Being someone who grew up in New Jersey and has lived in New York for the past ten years, I love anything set in my city.  (Well, not anything.)  But I’ve always wondered if there are things about these types of programs that simply don’t translate.  Whenever I talk about this, I always cite the 30 Rock episode where Jack gets bed bugs.  He then has to go on the subway and beg for change (I don’t remember exactly what the impetus was for this, but just go with it) and he gives the most hilariously spot-on subway speech you will ever hear.  Plus, he’s Jack Donaghy and he’s obviously wearing a suit, so the visual is just fantastic.  I remember the first time I saw that scene just dying laughing, but that was also the scene that made me realize why, maybe, 30 Rock was never super popular with the vast majority of the country.  I mean, if you don’t live in New York, how does that joke translate?  Do you even get it?  (Fittingly, Broad City did a version of this joke in a recent episode called “The Lockout” which also absolutely killed me.)  And then more broadly, there is just a way that people live in New York that I realize may make no sense to people who aren’t living it.  GIRLS and Broad City both show a kind of fast-paced, struggling all the time in at least some vague way, mild narcissism that is just part of living in New York City in your 20s.  To be fair, I never lived somewhere else in my 20s, so maybe this does all translate perfectly, but I’m not sure.

Finally, I recently listened to the episode of my favorite podcast, “Girls in Hoodies” on Grantland when they talked about Broad City.  One of the Hoodies, who is a pretty vocal GIRLS detractor, said how much she liked Broad City because she “like[s] sitcoms where the main characters are kind of terrible people who are in unglamorous situations frequently.”  She went on to say that you get to like the characters, even though they’re unlikeable, but they’ll do anything and it’s great fun to watch.  That is a totally legit description of Broad City, but um, isn’t it also a description of GIRLS?  Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shosh are pretty freaking unlikeable a lot of the time and never have I ever seen any of them doing anything even remotely glamorous.  (No, nothing Marnie has ever done counts because it always just ends with her embarrassing herself in some way.)  I think the real criticism with GIRLS in a lot of comparisons/critiques is (1) I don’t like Hannah, so I can’t like this show and (2) Broad City makes me laugh so much and GIRLS doesn’t make me laugh the way I thought it was going to.  Which is fine, I guess, but I have two responses.  First, I don’t watch Mad Men and I didn’t watch Breaking Bad, but my general impression is that people don’t actually like Don Draper or Walter White.  Why do you have to like Hannah Horvath to like the show GIRLS?  People seem to really need to like their female characters in a way that they don’t need to with their male characters, which I don’t really get, but find interesting.  Secondly, I think GIRLS is plenty funny, but I understand that some people thought it was going to be, like, a laugh a minute show, and it’s just not.  And if that’s only what you’re in for, then you’re definitely more of a Broad City person than a GIRLS person.  I think that’s completely fair, but to reiterate my point above, I just don’t think the sole purpose of GIRLS is to make you laugh, whereas the, if not sole, than at least primary, purpose of Broad City is to crack you up.

I guess my main point is twofold: (1) I get why people compare GIRLS and Broad City, even if I think the comparison doesn’t always make sense and (2) You don’t have to use Broad City as a vehicle in which to put down GIRLS.  They’re both good shows, but they’re totally different, and there’s space to like (or dislike) them both.  Also, Abbi and Ilana recently got asked about the GIRLS comparisons and essentially said that they think it’s amazing that they’re compared to that show because they like it and they think Lena is great.  So that’s awesome.

Anyway, these are two of my favorite shows on television right now, and they’re totally about and made by women, which is amazing in and of itself, and something that should be celebrated.  Cheers to funny women taking over the world (or at least New York City)!

Xo,

Christine