Ilana Glazer is really glad she pulled the plug on filming Broad City in Israel
"It was just a bad vibe," Glazer said, of a last-minute decision to cancel plans to film an episode of the show in Israel.
In the five years since she and Abbi Jacobson decided to end their beloved Comedy Central series Broad City, Ilana Glazer has embarked on a number of projects, including producing Tony-winning musical A Strange Loop, starring in projects like The Afterparty and Babes, and recording stand-up specials. (Also, she had a kid.) None of which has stopped Glazer from occasionally reflecting on Broad City‘s success and impact on her life, something she did in a recent Daily Beast interview timed to new stand-up special Human Magic. That includes talk about what-might-have-beens and glad-we-didn’ts—most especially a discussion of plans to film the show in Israel that fell apart after Glazer and Jacobson became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea.
This is, as noted by Glazer, all related to the show’s two-part third-season finale, which saw the fictional Abbi and Ilana try to get to Israel for a Birthright-sponsored trip, only to get turned back immediately for generalized Broad City-esque chaos. Originally, though, “We were actually going to film in Israel,” Glazer said. “There was violence happening between Israelis and Palestinians. And I don’t think either one of us had taken our journey into understanding the situation there to the degree that we do now, but it was just a bad vibe. And we were promised all of this army protection, you can film and there will be soldiers there with guns, and we were like, wait, what are we doing? We have to fully pull the plug. This is not appealing and that’s not what safety sounds like. And yeah, we pulled it.”
Glazer said plans for the episode—which would have “included the Red Sea curing my bacne”—were far enough along that location scouting was about to happen in the country. “Our director, Lucia Aniello, one of the creators of Hacks, was literally walking to the door with her suitcase to go location-scout when she got the call that we were like, ‘We can’t do this, dude. This is freaking us out.’” For what it’s worth, Glazer says she’s genuinely happy that she and Jacobson called an audible: “I’m very glad, and I actually feel like our values now are related to why we pulled the plug then. It’s just kind of funny how things unfold.”
Human Magic airs on Hulu on December 20.