The television show Broad City is a comedy web series that aims to represent a group of people living in New York City. Broad City is loosely based around a group of twenty-somethings attempting to manoeuvre their way around love, life, careers and The Big Apple. A web series is a relatively new way of “television”, known professionally as transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling can include other mediums such as trailers, deleted scenes and prequels and sequels, or series such as Broad City – original content. Culturally, among Internet users, Broad City is a popular show with a strong cult following that has seen it move from Internet only to its regular spot as a series on cable channel Comedy Central.
Historically, when webisodes or web series first started, it was highly unlikely that they would make it into mainstream television and find their way onto the silver screen; however, lately there has been a surge in the amount of web series or ‘webstars’ that have made their way onto TV. From Broad City, to YouTuber Grace Helbig’s The Grace Helbig Show on E! and Tyler Oakley scoring a guest spot on NBC’s The Ellen Degeneres Show. We can now see a rise in the culture of transmedia storytelling, something that clearly appeals to a wide range of the world’s demographic. This is happening because there is such a huge YouTube culture – Australia’s ABC network reaches 2,181,000 people a week (OzTAM, 2015), whereas someone like YouTuber Jenna Marbles, who at the time of writing this has 15,386,372 subscribers, averages around 4 million views per weekly video (YouTube @JennaMarbles). To put in into perspective, compared to popular television stars and channels, Jenna Marbles has “more Facebook fans than Jennifer Lawrence, more Twitter followers than Fox News and more Instagram friends than Oprah” (O’Leary, 2013).
Similarly, our case study of Broad City was picked up by Comedy Central, which has exposed the program to an entirely different audience that would usually tune in each week for a new webisode. It is also co-produced by comedy legend Amy Poehler (Framke, 2014) which helped give the show a more commercialised feel once it transferred into it’s half an hour slot each week. The organic webisode style that Broad City is known for can be accredited to its niche subculture of young, hip and ‘cool’ audience that tunes in each week. Broad City, while it isn’t as popular as such related shows as Friends, Parks and Recreation and HBO’s extremely likeable series Girls, the television series still has a large following like the aforementioned shows – proving that this idea of a ‘real’ yet comedically scripted look at life truly is. This genre of television is so popular because it’s extremely witty, real and unbelievably believable.
Broad City could arguably still be as popular as it is without the transmedia storytelling of the original series airing via the internet, however I believe that it wouldn’t be as exposed to such a wide range of people from all over the world if it didn’t have the immense power of the internet backing it up.
Framke, Caroline (2014) Broad City: “What A Wonderful World” A.V. Club
O’Leary, Amy (2013) “The Woman with 1 Billion Clicks, Jenna Marbles.” The New York Times
OzTAM (2015) “Consolidated National Subscription TV Share and Reach National Share and Reach Report” OzTam Measuring Audiences