TV Tuesdays 2: Broad City

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Welcome to the second installment of TV Tuesdays!

Last week we establish that representation matters (justice for syphilis). Longtime reader and friend Weems commented about whether I had thoughts about Broad City. Now truly, what show better represented 2010’s-era neurotic, horny, low-income, urban women than Broad City?

I’m about to make some generalizations based on my extremely faulty stoner memory. Before you come along with “Well, X came out in 19XX and 6 people saw it,” I’m no media scholar. I’m just a girl with a newsletter talking about shit that interests me.

But to my untrained eye, the 2010s seem like truly an inflection point for female representation. The 90’s ushered in the era of gross, dumb, stoner male comedic protagonists. The genre reached its heights, at least in my opinion, with Judd Apatow in the early aughts. But it wasn’t until the 2010’s that females were allowed to be as horny, crass, and disgusting as men on-screen and still be worth rooting for by general audiences. The trend kind of started (or at least found mainstream success) with Bridesmaids in 2011 and imo reached its zenith (imo) with Booksmart in 2019.

Women began to be allowed to be complex. We were allowed to be repulsive sometimes but still likable overall. We were allowed to do things that might kill your boner while still being fuckable on the whole. We still had to be fuckable. Come on. But less uniformly, unthreateningly, straightforwardly so.

Fear is a flavor of arousal. And female sexual desire is one of the most frightening things on Earth. Before the 2010’s, women could be horny onscreen. But their desire had to be hot and/or scary.

The 2010’s ushered in an era of women getting to be sexual without having do it sexily.

For example, Broad City showed Ilana’s libido as over-the-top, out-of-context, and even slightly menacing at times. It was rarely (if ever) straightforwardly, classically “sexy.”

Booksmart took this to a new level, imo. When Amy and Molly talked about masturbation it was as funny in a benign and not-particularly-arousing way as previous depictions of male masturbation.

I’m not saying it took 30 years for women to be allowed to be similarly complicated onscreen due to cishet rich able-bodied neurotypical white dude gatekeepers. But I will say that Maggie Gyllenhaal told Elle she had to fight her co-producers to keep scenes of genuine female sexual pleasure and desire in her show The Deuce. “Let her show what her desire looks like, even if it’s idiosyncratic and unusual,” Maggie Gyllenhaal said she said to the other execs.

It’s also telling that the 2010s began the webseries-to-TV pipeline. Broad City, Insecure, and other shows that featured under-represented protagonists depicted in groundbreaking ways got their start as a webseries. Cheap cameras and YouTube distribution allowed creators to develop a style and an audience without first getting approval from gatekeepers.

Broad City broke other ground as well. Their pegging episode aired in 2015. But it’s taken until 2023 for the act to become fetish of the year. They showed a mushroom trip as well, laying the groundwork for Booksmart’s excellent psychedelic scene (one of the best onscreen depictions of tripping I’ve ever seen).

I don’t know whether and to what extent Broad City holds up. But I’ll always have a place in my heart for it and everything it helped usher in.