Broad City: "Burning Bridges"

“Broad City” is not usually the show you’d watch if you want to cry. For emotional trauma as a result of George R. R. Martin callously killing off your favorite character, “Game of Thrones” is a much better choice. But in its eighth episode of the season, “Broad City” carries through the commitment to development that it manifested in the previous episode and includes one of the most affecting scenes aired on a comedy show in recent memory. As earlier episodes foreshadowed, Lincoln decides to break up with Ilana and begin a monogamous relationship with the other girl he had been dating—and Ilana’s attempts to avoid the conversation, while hilarious (“We haven’t even had a threesome with a boy yet”), are also touchingly vulnerable.

But nothing else in the episode comes close to the emotional gravity of Ilana’s breakdown at the end of the episode when she tearfully tells Abbi what happened between her and Lincoln. In the context of Ilana’s relentlessly casual approach to their relationship, from which her interactions with Lincoln derive a great deal of their humor, this scene verges on heartbreaking. Not tearing up when Ilana admits to Abbi, “And he doesn’t even want to be friends, you know, he never really did. I just never heard it,” would be an impressive feat of stoicism. Part of what makes Ilana so appealing as a character is her indefatigable happy-go-lucky attitude; that Glazer and Jacobson have, nearly a full three seasons into the show, allowed her to cry brings a poignant emotional payoff.

This being “Broad City,” however, the episode has its fair share of clever comedy, although the tone of the episode is ultimately defined by its final few scenes. The episode’s climax, in which Abbi gets trapped simultaneously on a date with Trey and attending Ilana’s parents’ anniversary dinner, pays brilliant homage to “Mrs. Doubtfire.” A scene earlier in the episode, in which Bevers reveals a surprising understanding of fashion, is one of the character’s best in the show thus far. Nor does this episode skimp on social commentary: A moment in which Ilana stops hooking up with a stranger when she learns he is married nicely elucidates the difference between an open relationship and cheating.

But it’s the episode’s closing that best encapsulates its tone. Sitting in a bathtub together and getting stoned, Abbi and Ilana confess the secrets they have kept from each other. The scene upholds much of the episode’s earlier emotional purchase—”I was starting to kinda like Trey,” says Abbi. “Like, like like”—but it also emphasizes what is, and has always been, at the core of “Broad City.” This episode is emotionally significant not merely because of the relationship issues that Abbi and Ilana go through but because, at the end of it all, they are still stubbornly there for each other.

—Staff writer Grace E. Huckins can be reached at grace.huckins@thecrimson.com.