‘Broad City’ Announces Final Season

Broad City will end after its fifth season, expected to air in early 2019, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The show’s creators and stars, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, have also signed a first-look deal with Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom, and are already working on future projects for the companies.

“Broad City has been our baby and first love for almost 10 years, since we started as a web series,” said Jacobson and Glazer. “It’s been a phenomenal experience, and we’ve put ourselves into it completely. Broad City‘s always had a spontaneous pace and feeling, and ending after season five honors that spirit. We are very excited to bring new voices and points of view to Comedy Central and continue our collaboration together in new ways.”

Glazer and Jacobson first developed Broad City while studying improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade. The web series launched in 2010, grabbing the attention of Amy Poehler, who served as a mentor to Glazer and Jacobson and later a producer when Broad City premiered on Comedy Central in 2014.

In an interview with THR, Comedy Central President Kent Alterman said it was Jacobson and Glazer’s decision to end the series and resolve the characters’ stories after Season Five.

“We’d never want them to overstay their welcome,” he said. “It was really driven by creative storytelling and when is a natural life [of the show]? We’re thrilled with five seasons of a show like this. The last thing we’d want is them to pretend they’re younger than they are and contrive and force it. The thing that matters to us more than anything is the creative integrity of the storytelling.”

As for Glazer and Jacobson’s new deal with Viacom, the pair are attached to three burgeoning TV shows, though not as writers or actors. Alterman said the network would certainly welcome a new project from Glazer and Jacobson, but added they weren’t rushing anything. 

“They’re unwinding a 10-year intense deep dive into this show and these characters [counting the web series],” Alterman said. “The first stuff coming at us is stuff that they’re bringing people they’ve collaborated with and new ideas. We’re taking it as it comes. We haven’t even discussed that. But if they had something they wanted to do on-camera, we wouldn’t refuse it. But it has to come organically.”

Glazer and Jacobson are involved in various other projects as well. Jacobson is starring alongside Dave Franco in Marja-Lewis Ryan’s new addiction drama, 6 Balloons, while she was also recently tapped to co-write a television adaptation of A League of Their Own for Amazon. Glazer meanwhile starred in the 2017 comedy, Rough Night.