If you’re a fan of Broad City, you know that the half-hour comedy show born from a zany web series concerns itself with the grossest, pettiest, and most deeply relatable things grown women do. Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s characters have had condoms fall out their vaginas, asked friends to pop their back acne, gotten too stoned and lost the ability to function, and had various moments of awkward, hilarious sex. But if you’re a male network executive, maybe you just see a show about two girls and their problems.
Jacobson details the experience of pitching the show to FX in her new memoir I Might Regret This, per Vulture. After developing the script for a year with their executive producer and guardian angel Amy Poehler, Jacobson and Glazer handed the script off to a higher-up who had never met them. “He’d probably never heard of us, the show, or the year we’d been in development, and he wasn’t into it,” Jacobson writes. They were told it was “‘too girly.’”
“We were devastated,” Jacobson writes. In the book, she goes on to rail against “development for development’s sake” and the challenge of creating something that pleases one guy at the top, when a show already has signs of a loyal following: “I suppose that’s the vision of any given network, but that’s a tough battle to win.”
Of course in the end, Comedy Central picked up Broad City and opened the door to many jokes about weed, pegging, and bodily functions. So in a way, we can thank FX for that.