Broad City finally makes its triumphant third season return tonight, a show that incidentally always hands out a lot of hacks to cruise through life. It promises to be another bizarre season on Comedy Central for Abbi and Ilana, but what about the women behind the women? How did creators and stars Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer build one of today’s best series and take over comedy?
Unfortunately the real Abbi and Ilana aren’t exactly like the Broad City Abbi and Ilana, but let’s face it, no human really could be. Glazer and Jacobson met at Upright Citizens Brigade, and not wanting to just wait and be discovered, they wrote and starred in their own web series, Broad City, from 2009 to 2011. They wrote about topics they knew, like living in NYC, really awkward first dates, and Hannibal Buress. You know, life!
Jacobson and Glazer knew that to be successful, they had to treat the web series like a second job, which is a sentence that would absolutely scare off the TV Ilana and Abbi. Blog writing, PR, and photo shoots to promote each episode became their lives. So when the comedians were ready to pitch a Broad City pilot, they felt confident enough to ask Amy Poehler to produce it. Poehler, renowned UCB alum, became interested in the series, started mentoring the pair, and worked as executive producer once it came to Comedy Central. And now it’s one of the channel’s signature shows.
To see the early days of Ilana and Abbi, be sure to watch the entire web series, which you can do before tonight’s premiere if you start right now.
