BROAD CITY

*** (out of ****)

If I was president of the world, I would force the 1% to watch Broad City. Most conservatives speak about the poor like my mom used to speak about Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. They’re silly things they want nothing to do with, and hopefully this phase will be over soon. In fact, they might be fictional. I don’t want to just prove the existence of poor people. I want the ladies of Broad City to be their new idea of what poor can be. Oh, the ways this would fuck them up.

Ilana and Abbi are Ilana and Abbi, two twenty-somethings trying to survive in New York City. The show started as a web series, which is something that usually scares me, until you see that PopFilter Hall of Famer Amy Poehler is responsible for getting this from the internet to Comedy Central. In the first episode, the dynamic duo need to raise $300 in order to go to a Lil Wayne concert. They try to earn the money by street performing and cleaning apartments in their underwear. They end up not earning the money, and getting shitfaced in an alley way. Imagine a conservative just hearing that story, much less watching it play out for 30 minutes. Their minds would be blown! It would take the same amount of suspension of disbelief as watching Star Wars (and yet most of them are very religious). BUT — the experiment can only work if you buy Ilana and Abbi as borderline homeless people AND best friends AND people you want to win. If they also tell a couple of funny jokes in the meantime, all the better.

The girls nail it. After only one episode, their chemistry is palpable. Sure, they have the advantage of having done this show for a while now, but it’s not their fault that other, shittier comedies don’t do that. Their relationship is so well-defined and apparent on the show that it makes you think you know what they’re like in real life. How their writing room works. Although they’re roughly the same age, and live in the same city, this show has nothing to do with Girls. It doesn’t owe anything to Girls, and it isn’t a response to Girls detractors, like the Girls pilot felt a little like to a different HBO show about four broads living in that same city. But both shows prove that, despite having similar one second pitches, it’s not about the premise, it’s about the voices of the creators. I don’t know if the comedy of Broad City is going to be for everyone — a lot of jokes fell flat for me — but knowing that there are people who have different characters and lives to show us is more than enough reason for me to keep watching.

-Ryan Haley