The Broad City gals have their own, decidedly low-budget spa day

By Joe Blevins | October 8, 2015 | 5:58pm

Aux Features TV

The Broad City gals have their own, decidedly low-budget spa day

The gap between seasons can be tough on fans of basic cable TV series. These forlorn viewers may suffer withdrawal symptoms without new episodes to watch for months (or, in some cases, years) on end. Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, the stars and creators of Comedy Central’s Broad City, understand this perfectly, and they sympathize. The show’s second season ended way back in March, and the sitcom will not return until February 2016. What to do in the interim? How about some brief but entertaining YouTube videos? “Hack Into Broad City” is the name of Glazer and Jacobson’s new web-based spin-off series, and the second episode—after Yom Kippur—has arrived in the form of a funny, raunchy, two-minute vignette called “Spa Day.” For anyone jonesing for a Broad City fix, these mini-episodes could presumably serve as a sort of video methadone.

Viewers will be relieved and delighted to know that the two underemployed New York twentysomethings of Broad City have not changed a bit since March. “Spa Day” finds the pair Skyping while enduring a dubious beauty treatment that involves rubbing a greenish, skin-burning cream on their faces and bodies. Not having the wherewithal to attend a real spa, they do all this from their respective, cluttered apartments. While they wait for the cream to do whatever it does, they banter back and forth about the overwhelming sexiness of Jessica Lange and the comfort of wearing their boyfriends’ shirts, American flag baseball caps, and gold confirmation crosses. Ilana admits that the last one must be “the Long Island version” of the romantic tradition, since Abbi finds it baffling. Things take a turn for the worse, though, when both of the women get the cream into inconvenient spots. That’s when this “Spa Day” goes into crisis-management mode.