December 10, 2017

Broad City: Season 4


Oof, I'm way behind on my posts. (Does it matter? Does anyone read these?) Anyway I'll make this one quick.

When Broad City first came on I immediately recognized a Workaholics bent to it - no two shows are identical, but the misadventures of Abbi and Ilana, two twenty-somethings just living and existing in New York, felt a whole lot like Ders and Blake and Adam just spending their twenties fucking around at a telemarketing job. And just as I eventually thought Workaholics wore out its welcome as its characters grew older and older - and their situation in turn got sadder and sadder - I'm starting to feel that way about Broad City. In its fourth season the show was still churning out laugh lines now and again, but it also struck me as stale and uninspired for the first time.

It's reductive, but it also makes a certain amount of sense to just look at where a show ranks in my year-end rankings to get the gist of how I felt about it year after year. In Broad City's case, that would be #24 of 43 in 2014, #23 of 60 in 2015, and #25 of 80 in 2016 - remarkably consistent, and "getting better" in an average or percentile sense every year. Now? I'm still working on my 2017 rankings, but for the moment it's all the way down in the 70s (of nearly 100). Clearly the bottom fell out of this one. Oh well! Here's hoping for a bounceback in 2018.

1 comment:

  1. I still read 'em! Then again, it's a fairly slow day at work.

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