Because no Broad City viewer is any stranger to a birthday premise on the show by now, Ilana (Ilana Glazer) announces in a sing-song voice into the smudged lens of her iPhone camera, “Dirty thirty,” as she commences the complete documentation of her day spent with Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) traversing the length of Manhattan from the “tippity top” to the “tippity bottom” as a means of celebration. In true Ilana fashion, her head-to-toe ensemble is completely nonsensical for the event, including black studded wedges that prompt Abbi to foreshadowingly ask, “Are you sure those are the right shoes for this?” Ilana insists she feels more comfortable in wedges than anything else and it’s off they go to take the train to Inwood.
Documenting their stalled moment on the train as they make their way up, Glazer and Jacobson, who co-wrote the Nick Paley-directed teleplay, enhance the episode’s dark underpinning theme of social media being an insidious power with diabolical god-like control over our emotions and actions with a sendup of the usual MTA excuse, “We’re delayed due to a ‘sick’ passenger ahead of us,” replaced by, “We’re delayed due to a passenger jumping onto the track to take a selfie.”
Finally landing in Inwood to begin their journey, Ilana and Abbi try (sans trying) to project the good times they’re actually having without it being an illusion–the way most “people their age”–you know the ones who have already gotten married and had children by now–must force it out. This much is proven after Abbi encounters a college acquaintance (from MICA, if you want added specificity) at the mall named Lindsay a.k.a. “Cheese.” Saddled with four kids, one of which Ilana and Abbi find themselves hanging out with as though she’s their newly adopted friend/daughter, Lindsay later admits her social media image of happiness and contented motherhood is a lie. Ilana, just as she did in “The Matrix,” is the first to then condemn the damaging effects of technology (in the 2015 episode, the lambasting came in the form of, “It’s like all we do is wake up, sign in, and zzzzzzzzt we are plugged into the matrix all day! Gmail, Grindr, Facebook, Facetime, Insta, Grindr, Tumblr, Twitter, Dlisted!”).
To be sure, whenever social media or phones in general are at play, something seems to go awry in the Wexler/Abrams world, typically involving someone falling down a hole. In “The Matrix” it was Abbi rollerblading into a pit in Prospect Park, and, with no phones to find the address of the dog wedding they’re trying to get to, ending up hopelessly stuck for all of thirty minutes. In “Stories,” Ilana is the one to fall down the manhole, or “womanhole” as she calls it, thanks to, naturally, her ill-advised footwear (beware the closeup shot of the wreckage). Abbi, of course, serves as her knightess in shining armor, crawling up the ladder with Ilana on her back. In so many regards, this serves as a metaphor for the entire relationship, with each girl alternating in the role of protector and rescuer (Ilana had to play that part–granted, with much less efficacy–in “The Matrix”) at any given moment.
Regardless of differing roles or personalities, one thing they can always remain on the same page for is the absurdity of modern politics (bittersweetly, Abbi remarks while they’re stopped in a Harlem restaurant, “Just laughing at this Onion article,” to which Ilana points out, “That’s the Times“). To that point, a largely improv’d scene in which Abbi and Ilana pass the Trump Tower to speak (and gesture) their minds finds plenty of opportunity for the editing process of adding in thunder bolts spewing out of Abbi’s middle fingers (this is, after all, an alternate reality Broad City platform, and any kind of emoji they want can exist as part of the catalogue we’re already familiar with).
As far as the complexity of shooting and post-production for “Stories,” in the spirit of Tangerine, the episode “was filmed entirely on the iPhone (using six iPhone Xs that were constantly swapped in and out).” This, obviously, lends further authenticity to the unnamed amalgam of a platform that seems to combine every element of Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook’s own story options.
Then, to iterate how falsely self-inflated all of our egos are–as if anyone really gives a shit about what we’re doing and, accordingly, how much time we’ve wasted putting in the effort of making these falsely depicted stories, Ilana says, “If any of my 213 followers” can help… Because 213 is tantamount to thirteen in the age of the celebrity Instagram with millions upon millions of “followers” (paid for or not).
By the end of the daunting voyage to Lower Manhattan, both Abbi and Ilana have lost or broken their phones, at which point a triple rainbow appears over the Statue of Liberty. Ruing, in true millennial/gen Z fashion, that they can’t document it therefore no one will ever believe what they saw, they suddenly have the epiphany that they barely remember the events of the day due to this obsession with filming and photographing every quickly forgotten and disposable moment.
While not “full-stop” in coming to a resolution on how to cope with that revelation as they do by the end of “The Matrix” (which is, “I miss the blue light.” “I want to marry the blue light”), it would seem as though Abbi, at least, is the most determined to “get off social media”–phrasing it in appropriate crack pipe terms. There is, in the end, still no easy solution to the “problem” at hand, the wheels too far in motion at this point to go back to “how it was” (even as late as 2009, when Glazer and Jacobson first began producing the webisodes for the show). Temperance? Sure. But that seems a bit naïve considering that we’ve been too long conditioned to serve the ego with these oh so pretty tools of self-inflation and privacy invasion. We’ll see, as season five unfolds, how committed Abbi and Ilana can remain to abnegation.
