The latest season of "Broad City" brought us all the crazy, half-baked shenanigans and surprise celebrity cameos (Hillary Clinton?!) that we've come to love about the show. But it also nailed something that so few comedies get about being a young single woman -- that weird transition period between your late 20s into your early 30s, when many women begin to realize that their choices will truly impact the rest of their lives.
Like its contemporary "Girls," earlier seasons of "Broad City" featured its main characters go from one crazy scenario to the next with few concrete ramifications. But in Season 3 of "Broad City," Abbi and Ilana were forced to deal with the actual, real-life repercussions of their antics. Abbi's main wake up call was in facing the fallout from lying to Ilana about her secret relationship with Trey.
And Ilana, gloriously, was finally fired from Deals Deals Deals, after years of taking naps on the job, showing up four hours late to work, and just being overall obnoxious. She also was forced to confront the fact that Lincoln (Hannibal Buress), her friend with benefits, wanted to break off their arrangement in order to pursue a monogamous relationship.
At a special preview screening of the "Broad City" season finale at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer and writers Paul Downs and Lucia Aniello talked about why the drastic changes to the characters' lives this season was so intriguing.
"In your 20s there's a string of adventures you have. And now the girls are kind of evolving as people," Downs, who plays Trey on the show, said. "And now their actions have repercussions. It's kind of cool to see what that means for both of them."
And for Glazer, the evolution of Abbi and Ilana mimics the evolution of her and Jacobson in real-life, who began doing the show in their early-to-mid 20s and are now 28 and 32, respectively.
"We're getting older, too. So, it's like, OK. How long are we gonna do this? [We need] to allow room for change. I think the show can record evolution."
What's been most compelling about this season of "Broad City" is that its showing new glimpses of the characters' personalities, but not at the expense of the quirks that fans have come to know and love. Despite the over-the-top humor of the show, it's a refreshingly honest approach -- revealing that becoming a real adult is a gradual process, one that doesn't necessarily culminate with having kids or getting married or having it all figured out.
In the Season 3 finale, set to air appropriately this Wednesday on 4/20, Abbi and Ilana are still very much up to their same old antics (Ilana wants to join the "mohel high" club during their flight to Israel, Abbi will stop at nothing to find a tampon). They're still hilariously ridiculous, reckless, a little obnoxious. But the world of the show, which in the past has stretched itself to accommodate their antics, is pushing back against them, challenging them. It's refreshing: Abbi and Ilana are finally growing up, and that's not such a bad thing.
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