They already have a hit TV show and Amy Poehler’s stamp of approval, but this week arguably marks the point at which Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson have well and truly Made It: on top of everything else, they’ve now been immortalized in a New Yorker profile. Written by Nick Paumgarten, who charmingly billed himself as a “hockey dad” in his March piece on the Berlin EDM scene, the piece — which is paywalled but accessible here for those with subscriptions — is hardly a hit job. But it is a take on Glazer, Jacobson, and their web-series-turned-real-series by someone a few steps removed from its target demo of “naïve impertinent Millennials” (umlaut and capital M included, because it wouldn’t be The New Yorker without idiosyncratic house style).
Despite his early use of the M-bomb, Paumgarten gets a lot of Broad City‘s appeal right. He quotes Poehler’s condemnation of the slacker comedy double standard — “Young women can be lost, too” — and Anne Helen Petersen’s Dear Television dispatch on Abbi and Ilana as “unruly women.” Paumgarten himself understands Broad City‘s ability to draw on the vast, untapped demand among the overlooked half of the 18-to-34 demographic for both “an unpretentious portrait of a friendship between women” and “idols of a largely under-served and under-chronicled female id.”
Yet Paumgarten is also fully aware that, while he’s certainly closer to the Broad City audience than, say, the kind of viewer who looks to TV as a source of formulaic procedurals to use as sleep aids, he’s also not meant to watch Abbi put a baggie of weed in an unmentionable place and think, “THAT’S ME!!!” So along with the biographical detail and quirky anecdotes that characterize any New Yorker profile, there’s also a palpable distance between Paumgarten and the performers he’s evaluating, a distance some might argue allows him necessary perspective but also leaves the final product without the enthusiasm of Broad City‘s earlier raves. Or, as Slate’s Willa Paskin, whose take on the show is quoted in the profile, wrote on Twitter: “All for objectivity, but wish the guy writing about Broad City really deep-loved Broad City.”
There are tiny details that rubbed me the wrong way about Paumgarten’s approach, sure. He uncritically refers to Girls as one of its “touchstones,” for example, without differentiating Lena Dunham’s tragicomic approach from Broad City‘s straight comedy. (He also implies the Girls protagonists are “confident” but not self-effacing, though that’s an iffy statement for another day.) And a drop-in at the duo’s monthly UCB live show, which I’ve attended before, alleges that the unscripted, loosely structured hour “can come across as mailing it in.” I’d claim the spontaneity of a live show is the whole appeal of seeing people you’ve previously seen scripted, edited, and filtered through a screen in the flesh, but whatever.
What struck me most, however, were the smaller rhetorical flourishes, the ones that insinuate just how separate Paumgarten feels from the BuzzFeed-reading, pot-smoking young women who see Abbi and Ilana as exaggerated versions of themselves. “The enthusiastic response… seems to arise” (emphasis mine) from Glazer and Jacobson’s authentic connection; the “main attraction” of the live show “seems to be the two of them just being themselves” (emphasis mine once again). Paumgarten comes across as being hesitant to make declarative statements about Broad City‘s appeal partly because it doesn’t appeal to him as much as it does to some and partly because he’s cognizant of why that is: Broad City isn’t meant for him.
It’s a response that reminds me of my own feelings about Louie, a show I find fascinating but know is a lot less compelling to me than it would be, were I also struggling with single fatherhood and the indignities of aging. And it’s a response that’s far cooler than that of Broad City aficionados who are more like its protagonists, from freelance writer Ann Friedman (“Ilana and Abbi demonstrate what I absolutely found to be true in my 20s: when your job is falling far short of what you hoped and men are nothing but disappointment, your life is about your best girlfriends”) to this site’s TV editor, Pilot Viruet (“It’s a special show, not just because I think it’s the first series to really nail that feeling of being young in a big city but because it’s been confident from the very first minute and it’s been consistently hilarious”).
Paumgarten’s entitled to that reaction, of course. And as much as part of me wishes The New Yorker had let the profile be written by and not just about Glazer and Jacobson’s breed of witty, urban woman, it means something to see people like me represented at Condé Nast as well as Comedy Central. And to know that Ilana Glazer is the kind of girl who invites her parents to a 4/20 party.