Among the largely unacknowledged truths of contemporary female life is that women’s foundational relationships are as likely to be with one another as they are with the romantic partners who, we’re told, are supposed to complete us. –Rebecca Traister
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The final season of the critically acclaimed sitcom Broad City was released to Hulu a few months ago. Initially a web series created by comedians and real life best friends Abbi Jacobson and Illana Glazer, the show premiered on Comedy Central in 2014, and followed, over five seasons, the pair’s friendship and attempt to navigate life in New York City as single twenty-somethings.
I began the series late last year, and was no more than seven minutes into the first episode before I texted the Ilana to my Abbi. Stop whatever you’re doing and start Broad City, I wrote to her. I’ve never seen something more…us.
At its core, Broad City is a love story, one where I saw the truth of my early adult life reflected for the first time. The celebration of female friendship has been an emerging theme on television in recent decades, with Sex & the City suggesting that “maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates and guys are just people to have fun with,” and Leslie Knope introducing the world to Galentine’s Day, a day of “ladies celebrating ladies—like Lilith Fair, minus the angst.”
Like Abbi, Ilana, and many of my millennial peers, when my small group of girlfriends and I didn’t get married right out of college, we navigated adulthood with each other as our primary partners, learning how to do our taxes, nurse hangovers, and break up with men who could not love us. What initially made me fall for Broad City was that its plot didn’t center around grand moments in the girls’ lives, but on the companionship they found in the ordinary moments that make up most of life.
In this way, the show mimics the intimacy I practice in my friendships. When Illana takes Abbi to get her wisdom teeth removed, I thought of the hours of Netflix true crime documentaries I’ve watched on my best friend’s couch, keeping an eye on her after a medical procedure she routinely gets to treat a chronic illness. When the girls half-heartedly show up for their miserable jobs, Abbi as a janitor at a gym, and Ilana as a reluctant salesperson at a startup, I thought of the years we spent as secretaries, baristas, one ill-fated afternoon driving for Uber, and how the promise of happy hours spent in each other’s company kept us from setting our respective workplaces on fire. When the characters frantically clean Abbi’s apartment before her mom comes to town—throwing all of the unwashed dishes under Abbi’s comforter and stashing her weed in a hollowed out book—I thought of the frantic text my best friend sent while being wheeled into emergency surgery, instructing me to delete her online dating profile if she didn’t pull through, or the year of Sunday mornings she spent watching Saturday Night Live on my couch while her Grandparents thought she was at church.
Our Instagram feeds prove we’ve been there for the highlight reel occasions—job promotions, graduations, engagements. But the love we share in those instances was forged in the monotonous fire of driving each other to the emergency room when we had the flu, answering the phone after we’ve already been asleep for an hour to hear how the date went, or sternly reminding each other, for the hundredth time, that no, you cannot text your ex just because you are lonely, they were the worst, and you are a glowing sun goddess who deserves so much better.
Recently, I invited my best friend’s new boyfriend to a dinner in celebration of her birthday. Knowing he wouldn’t have my number, I jokingly identified myself as “your girlfriend’s other boyfriend.” Within minutes he replied, “Let’s be honest—you’re also her most important boyfriend.” It bodes well for him that he understands this.
In the series finale, Abbi is preparing to move to Colorado for an artists’ residency program, while Ilana is staying behind in New York to pursue her master’s degree. As Abbi loads her luggage into her cab, Ilana reminds her, “This is really brave, and it’s the right thing.”
Abbi replies, “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you.”
To say that I sobbed during this on-screen interaction would be an understatement, because my life, too, is changing, as are the lives of the girls I love most in the world. We are getting older: Our jobs have become careers and thus demand more of us, and for the first time ever we are all in romantic relationships, which involve time we once reserved solely for each other. My baby sister is getting married in a few months, and I’m beginning to wonder if I should move back to Oregon to be near home when our parents retire and my sister has children. Another friend is thinking of pursuing a job on the East Coast, and another, of having a baby. Our importance to each other hasn’t changed, yet our circumstances are. Still, where and who we are today? None of it would have been possible without each other.
“Me and you, we’re still going to be us, that’s never going to change,” Abbi says to Ilana through tears.
“I know, but it is going to change,” Ilana responds. “But this is still going to be the most beautiful, deep, real, cool and hot, meaningful, important relationship of my life.”
I’m not ready for things to change. Yet just as Abbi and Ilana helped me recognize and celebrate the friendships comprising the great love story of my twenties, they also gave me permission to be heartbroken at the thought of saying goodbye.
