Photo: Courtesy of Lacey Terrell/HBO; Lane Savage/Comedy Central; Discovery Channel/Kevin Lynch.Hump: How do you become one of the top Google searches of the weekend when your costars are Matthew McConaughey (who won a SAG Award that same weekend) and Woody Harrelson? Be Alexandra Daddario and go full frontal in HBO’s killer new drama, True Detective, obvs.
Marry: Broad City is the exact show I would make if I were ballsy enough to go on TV fake-doing all the stuff that would make my parents real-cry and wonder where they went wrong (I was supposed to be a neurosurgeon, for crissakes). Well, it’s the show I would aspire to make, because Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are infinitely more hilarious and brazen than I ever will be.
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No amount of booze could ever make me strip to my underwear and clean a stranger’s apartment — even if there were Lil’ Wayne tickets and an eighth at the other end. (Also, in my life, ballet and Broadway tix take precedence over Weezy.) I want to finish Season 1 of Damages and eat cashew stir-fry with Abbi. I want to drum in the park with Ilana. I want to know if there are places you can actually return office supplies for store credit. (Just kidding to all the HR people at my job who hopefully aren’t reading this!)
In creating their fictional alter-egos, Glazer and Jacobson have done the near-impossible: crafted a pair of crass, crude, slovenly, sarcastic, but loveable, fun, and dynamic characters. The fact that they happen to be female is almost secondary here, but of course, it bears mentioning that audiences typically have trouble responding to women like these who behave in non-stereotypical ways.
That’s my essential hang-up about Girls, to which, of course, Broad City will be compared time and time again (both shows center on 20-somethings in Brooklyn, after all). I don’t love any of them. I don’t even like any of them. They’re self-absorbed to the point where I start to side with Baby Boomers’ views about my own generation.
That’s not to say the broads of Broad City aren’t self-absorbed; but it comes from a place of almost childlike wonder at the world and its infinite possibilities. The girls of Girls have a world-weary, “everyone’s going to let me down while I’m here being a caring paragon of loving friendship” attitude — and they’re only 25. Give me Abbi and Ilana any day. Actually, give me Abbi’s cute neighbor.
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Kill: The King of the North returned to, uh, the north in his first post-Red Wedding gig. That gig, Klondike, tried so, so hard to be HBO/Game of Thrones-esque on a Discovery channel scale. And, from the imagery-laden, animated, GoT-style opening credits to the merciless battles for land, none of it worked.
Now trust me, I’ll look at Richard Madden anywhere television wants to show him to me, but can he please do a project where he can speak in his Scottish accent? Not only is it ridiculously sexy, I wouldn’t spend the entire time being distracted by his attempts to clip vowels and round out words.
It was a fairly solid first effort for Discovery’s new scripted programming arm, but next time, keep it simpler, guys. Klondike was so convoluted, that I had more trouble keeping track of the residents of Dawson than the populace of Westeros. And, there are a ton of people in Westeros. For your next venture, maybe team up with Lifetime for Tituba: Coven in Salem. Ryan Murphy can executive produce. Let me know if you want me to set up some meetings. It’ll be great.