Ilana Glazer was supposed to make two more seasons of Broad City. Here's why she decided not to
In a Q interview, Glazer explains the ‘painful’ choices behind her hit comedy show
When creators sign a contract to produce and write seven seasons of a TV show with a big network like Comedy Central, they tend to deliver. But not Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson.
The creators, writers and stars of the hit show Broad City ended their show after just five seasons — two seasons less than they promised Comedy Central in their contract.
The show explored the friendship of two characters, also named Ilana and Abbi, who are both 20-somethings living in New York, just like their real-life creators. But by the time the comedy finished in 2019, Glazer was 32.
"My entire transition from adolescence into adulthood was Broad City," she tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "We just felt like, man, we're reaching the end of being able to tell this messy, 20-something story."
Glazer and Jacbson also decided to axe the show because they were going in different creative directions. Glazer wanted to focus more on her stand-up comedy, whereas Jacobson went on to create and star in a reboot of A League of Their Own.
Plus, the demands of a network TV show weighed on Glazer. She had an "artful" and "creative" business partnership with Jacobson, but found it hard to constantly churn out episodes.
"The extraction of that comedy was painful, on a schedule — like a forced birth kind of thing," she says.
WATCH | Ilana Glazer's interview with Tom Power:
But leaving it all behind wasn't easy for Glazer, either.
She started doing stand-up comedy again during Season 4 of the show as a way to separate herself from Ilana of Broad City; yet the show was also central to her identity. She needed to find the middle ground, which is something she continued to do after the show ended.
"I have worked through a lot of panic and anxiety and depression and grief of Broad City, grief of that sense of self," she says.
Glazer is now on her fifth stand-up comedy tour, with stops across the U.S. and in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.
"I have never enjoyed stand-up this much," she says. "I've been doing stand-up and live performance, in a real way, in New York City, for 17 years. And this is the first time that I'm taking the most pleasure I've ever taken in live performance."
Glazer believes that psychoanalysis has been why she has been able to find so much joy on this comedy tour. She attends sessions three times a week to help her become more comfortable being herself — rather than a character — on stage.
"That's part of taking that pleasure: to know what it feels like in my body on that stage. That's just for me," she says. "I'm, for the first time in my life, able to claim it."
The full interview with Ilana Glazer is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. She talks more about making peace with her 30s and why she thinks stand-up can be a useful tool to ease anxiety. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Ilana Glazer produced by Vanessa Greco.
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