http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/id-girls

“The rule is: Specific voices are funny, and chemistry can’t be faked,” Amy Poehler, the show’s executive producer, told me. “There’s something about them that’s really watchable and organic and interesting. There aren’t enough like them on TV: confident, sexually active, self-effacing women, girlfriends who love each other the most.”

“Women always have to be the eye rollers, as the men make a mess,” Poehler said. “We didn’t want that. Young women can be lost, too.”

The Los Angeles Review of Books put them in the tradition of “unruly women,” like Roseanne and Lucy: “Unruly women have unruly bodies—they’re too big for their clothes, their hair refuses to stay down. They talk too much, laugh too loudly, say things ladies shouldn’t. They fart and burp and poop; they make themselves known, refuse taming.”

At first glance, Ilana is the alpha (the banana man) and Abbi the sidekick (the feed), but, in defiance of double-act convention, Jacobson and Glazer frequently subvert these roles, big-sis status shifting between them, or vanishing entirely, in part because, in the context of “Broad City,” neither aspires to it. The extent to which their characters are established and yet constantly surprising each other gives their interplay a kinetic unpredictability that may or may not owe something to their background in improv, or perhaps to the fact that they really are making it up as they go along. In real life, neither, it seems, is the dominant one. Jacobson is more confident and shrewder than her character on the show. Glazer is much more resolute. “This feels like a marriage, in the way that marriage is basically a business decision,” Glazer said the first day I met them.