Broad City is unique in that female representation exists at the forefront of each episode in Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, but there often are more male characters in any given episode. The male characters tend to provide obstacles or annoyance like Bevers or comedic relief in a show that is mostly comedy, Lincoln. Abbi and Ilana’s characters often have to work around the stubborn and problematic male characters, yet they still have a high degree of agency. Characters like Lincoln, Ilana’s friend with benefits, are strung along at the whims of whatever Ilana is pursuing. At one point Ilana says that they had been together five months; Lincoln corrects her that has been eighteen months. Lincoln, played by Hannibal Buress, is the only character in the show with such little agency, and he is the most prominent male character.
Gender is often connected to the class of the characters. Abbi and Ilana struggle to fund all of their escapades, and in one episode they clean a strange man’s house in their underwear to fund their Lil Wayne concert dreams. The man is shown to be creepy, but Ilana still has much of the agency and desire to do so as she had advertised her and Abbi online. Abbi usually has her agency limited for comedic effects: her dead end job, following Ilana’s impulsive lead, and living in an apartment with her roommate’s boyfriend that she hates. Still, there are moments where she has agency such as when she fakes needing to get AIDS test results to get off work.
Race has little influence on the show as Ilana’s boyfriend and her roommate both are successful dentists and drug dealers respectively despite being minority males. Ilana’s character is the primary queer character, and it is never shown to impede her or slow her down. It more often comes up as she tries to get Abbi to do small vaguely sexual things. And while the bosses on the show are male, they have little role in keeping Ilana and Abbi from cutting work, so the show appears to represent gender and other representational axes in a very fair and often funny way.
Here is an example of Lincoln being held at the whims of whatever Ilana wants to do.
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