Broad City (2014-2019) was a comedy series that aired on Comedy Central, after originating as a webseries. The half-hour irreverent and often raunchy comedy focused on the friendship of Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana (Ilana Glazer), two twentysomething besties navigating their lives and misadventures in New York City. Often the episodes are broken up by cheery, animated interstitials. Throughout the series, Ilana is most often seen in tanks or crop tops and shorts or more edgy clothing than Abbi (with some of her attire getting pointed out for cultural appropriation.)
Much of Broad City works as standalone episodes with Abbi and Ilana working their way through some wild mess or another they have gotten themselves into. The main relationship of focus of the series is the deep and chaotic friendship the two characters have with each other – including their mutual love of pot, and both wanting to “make it” in the city. Ultimately, the show is a celebration of the funkier side of modern female friendship.
Ilana is a Dionysian character on speed, hoping to live life to the hilt and squeeze every ounce of experience out of life that it has to offer. This includes a long-term fuck buddy, Lincoln (Hannibal Buress), and constantly but lovingly admiring Abbi’s posterior (which doesn’t bother her.) It also includes Abbi freely having sex with women, including one who looks like her doppelgänger (Alia Shawkat). She owns her queerness and has no trouble or hesitation in using the term “bi” to describe herself – a thoroughly messy bi, and proud of it.
For the first few seasons, Abbi seems to have only straight tendencies, including a famous episode where a partner introducing the idea of pegging to her ushered in the concept of pegging to a major American audience. But in the final season, Abbi starts a relationship with a doctor (Clea Duvall.) When this happens and Ilana — who has had a sexual crush on Abbi for the entirety of the series — discovers it, it does put her into a jealousy spiral for a while. But Ilana does snap out of it and they return to friendship – including calling Abbi out for trying to become a “hat girl” after the doctor gives her one as a gift.
While Abbi never uses the term “bi” for herself, it isn’t as irksome since Ilana has used the term to describe herself for multiple seasons.
Both creators/writers/stars Glazer and Jacobson have described themselves as bi or queer. Jacobson on the subject in a Vanity Fair article:
I kind of go both ways; I date men and women. They have to be funny, doing something they love.
In 2024, Jacobson married actress Jodi Balfour.
As for Glazer, it was through her work on the show that made her realize she was queer. From an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:
My queerness has been kind of shown to me through Broad City, and Abbi, too. We’ve both experienced this unique, privileged version of self-actualization, where we’ve gotten to work it out on the show and then reflect and be like, ‘Damn, I wasn’t joking. That was me.’ So, I’ve learned a lot from Broad City, including my own queerness and identity politics from reviews and reading people’s pieces.
Both characters in Broad City can be self-absorbed and selfish and have bonkers-level byzantine logic which gets them into absurd scrapes. Ultimately they are also well-fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters with hopes, wants, fears, and dreams which both include their queerness and go beyond it. As such, it makes for a very blue entry, but a really solid one as far as quality bi representation on the small screen.