theongreyjoy:

“Broad City,” a new series starting on Wednesday on Comedy Central, is funny, and, like so many other shows on that channel, brazen about skewering the millennial generation as hapless 20-somethings with no ambition, talent or self-respect. These slackers happen to be women, as the show’s creators, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, play comic versions of themselves. The show is as puerile and scatological as any male-centered series on Comedy Central, but oddly enough, it’s the self-degradation that gives it feminist cachet. As Sarah Silverman proved with her series on Comedy Central, “The Sarah Silverman Program,” which ran from 2007 to 2010, female characters are increasingly entitled to be as indolent, selfish and incompetent as male ones. That was not imaginable in earlier eras of television. The most successful sitcom heroines were plucky strivers, and the comedy lay in the pratfalls they took to achieve their goals — Lucy trying to break into show business on “I Love Lucy,” Mary Richards trying to mix love and career on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” or Murphy Brown trying to get her way on all things”