6) Broad City
Essentially the antithesis to Looking‘s basement-apartment-in-Oakland realism, Broad City is one of those rare series that presented an insanely bonkers reality in its first year and somehow managed to top all of its achievements in every conceivable way in year two. More of a series of skits than a plot-driven showcase of narrative flourishes, Broad City – like nearly every sitcom on this list – sketches such a fantastic hangout vibe with its characters that the reason to watch the show becomes less about what adventures Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) and Illana (Illana Glazer) will get into next, but how they’ll handle themselves within each self-contained little escapade.
Co-created by its co-leads Jacobson and Glazer, there’s a knowing, Amy Poehler/Tina Fey (Poehler is a producer) mind-meld going on between the two that creates an endearingly believable friendship amid all of the crazy. Between Ilana’s elongated, kooky syntax (“The va-yin-yah is nature’s pocket,” she croons to bestie Abbi in season one) and Abbi’s desperate attempts at being more than Soul Cycle’s on-call public bathroom pubic hair remover, Broad City refuses to box either of its leads into the straight-laced/crazy sidekick roles. And it’s that masterful back-breaking that makes the writers come up with such insanely over-the-top sequences (e.g. this year’s knockoff handbag quest in Chinatown) that repeatedly achieve what so little sitcoms on TV fail to: be unpredictable.