i went to bed last night knowing that one youtube gamerman fucked a youtube gamerwoman behind his cosplayer wife’s back. i wake up this morning to learn that two people got the bubonic plague in 2019 from eating a dead rat raw. it’s a good thing i lost my ability to feel surprised 3 years ago
Its conclusion celebrated what the show has done from the beginning: Insist that friendship can carry the same vitality as romance.
Abbi and Ilana look out over the East River, suspended, with their reclaimed street toilet, on the iconic bridge, the horizon spreading before them. Abbi takes a Sharpie and writes something on the railing of the wind-tossed landmark. Soon, the show’s roving camera reveals the message she has scrawled: “ABBI + ILANA FOREVER.”
It’s a fantastic scene, and only in part because it takes one of the running themes of Broad City—Abbi and Ilana treating New York’s topography as a playground for their adventures—and distills it down to something iconic. The scene also summons another of Broad City’s long-running jokes: the notion that the show that follows the familiar contours of the buddy comedy has also been, all along, a rom-com. The series has been explicit about that: It has repeatedly emphasized Ilana’s attraction to Abbi (Ilana once proposed marriage to her friend); it featured, as the premiere to Season 4, a Sliding Doors–inflected exploration of how the star-crossed friends almost didn’t cross paths at all—the pathos of love’s accidents.
But the idea has been stressed more subtly, too. The relationship that Abbi and Ilana share is platonic, but characterized still by the woozy warmth most traditionally associated with romantic relationships. Their affection for each other is unconditional. They find each other magical. They are the loves of each other’s lives. This is the stuff of sonnets and love songs, applied to the promises of best-friendship. As Abbi tells Ilana, finding her own kind of poetry, “I didn’t even know my ass was dope until you taught me it was!”
It’s an approach that can read as a rebellion, and that’s because it is. Broad City is in some ways a studiously small show: Its focus, over its five remarkable seasons, has been the wacky adventures and, more often, the wacky misadventures of its two protagonists. Abbi and Ilana have had other friends, and also boyfriends, and also girlfriends, and also parents, and also siblings, and also roommates, and also coworkers. Those relationships have all been secondary, though, to the relationship around which all the others have orbited. The pair’s friendship is total, and totalizing. The most beautiful, deep, real, cool-and-hot, meaningful, important relationship of my life.
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