From Broad City to Too Much: The Return of The Twenties on TV

Where were you back when being an adult became “adulting”? How many times have you proclaimed that “you’re just a girl” in the face of inconvenient responsibility? And are you often called back to the incoherent sitcom advice of Carrie and Miranda or Abbi and Ilana?

In the mid-2010s, television peaked for twenty-something comedies that gave levity and brilliance to the messiness of this era in life. Broad City, Girls, and the oh-so-rewatched SATC taught us that friendship could survive (and even thrive) in chaos.

The interpersonal connections of these series  insisted on their right to be unlikable, broke, and painfully self-serious. Insecure and its successors satirized the blissfully painful reality of the humiliation ritual that becoming a woman can be. Shortly after the craze in popularity for these series and their unmentioned counterparts, a drought fell upon the dramedy about twenty-somethings series worlds, yet none have gone unquoted, unreferenced, or unedited on TikTok (set to a Charli XCX remix). But in 2025, a miracle arrived in the form of a buddy comedy resurgence. Shows like Overcompensating, Adults, Too Much, and The Sex Lives of College Girls are ushering in a new version of the “lost twenties” narrative, with new series ordered that offer bespoke stories like “I Love LA”: Rachel Sennott’s trauma-bonded episodic comedy about primed Los Angeles transplants and natives. 

Where earlier characters stumbled through adulthood with naive earnestness, today’s leads are hyper-aware of their messiness.

When they fail, it feels like a vlog prompt or an inspiration for their untouched Substack article series, maybe even a story for their Hinge profile prompts. Although satirizing the dirty reality of failures in early adulthood isn’t new, it has been ushered in as the punchline rather than a supporting role in the greater comedic beats of these series.  

A decade after Broad City and Girls making fun of New York City’s ridiculous subcultures and the definitive millennial state of girlhood, and Insecure’s delivery of a woman’s navigation of love and success through a personal lens of life’s funniest of flops, new series are rewriting the foundation of poking fun and the new girl-to-girl who has it all pipeline.

Overcompensating leans into cringe-comedy, spotlighting characters who are too self-aware for their own good and the unshy awkwardness of being closeted and queer in college. Adults plays with the absurdities of post-grad survival — financial precarity, petty drama as hobbies, group chats as lifelines. Too Much thrives (and sometimes relies) on meta-humor and situational comedy, poking fun at the fact that every attempt at seriousness collapses into ironic chaos. 

The connective tissue is friendship, but not in the ride-or-die sense of Broad City (which I’m personally impartial to as a clingy Cancer rising). Instead, these relationships are more dead-on,  transient, reflective of the real world during this chapter of life where friends cycle in and out based on city moves, job shifts, and the occasional (and necessary)  mental health spirals or romantic crash outs.

There was a clear demand for Gen Z to see these dynamics in a more relatable and refined way, and every generation deserves to see its growing pains being made fun of and made into an arguably Oscar-winning edit that they can send to their roommate with the note “this is us”. Clear distinctions between the Jessica Salmon and the Hannah Horvaths of our screens can be easily identified, mimicking the differences of how life has become publicized for even the average struggling woman.

Today’s characters aren’t just fumbling in private; their mistakes are immediately broadcast, archived, and memed, even when set in the early 2010s era of MySpace status posts. New series like these are likely to lean into that reality, making self-awareness itself a joke, which we all love to identify with as we laugh.

 Earlier shows often revolved around career arcs — becoming a writer, an artist, a professional. In these stories, work is treated as an impermanent force: just another gig until rent’s due again, with love (both romantic and platonic) and self-discovery making it’s way to the front of the plotlines. The drama isn’t whether you’ll achieve your dream job, but whether you’ll survive another month on a corporate paycheck and/or side hustle while juggling the life stuff. 

Friendship has also rebranded in a reflective way! Abbi and Ilana were love at first sight-type of soulmates,  Issa and Molly had a bond that could bend but never break. Today’s friendships are less mythic and more transactional, reflecting a reality where people cycle through roommates, co-workers, and cities. It’s not worse — just different. Intimacy looks more like shared Uber rides or trauma bonding over failed connections rather than lifelong promises. 

So why do we keep coming back to these shows? Because they remind us that being lost is universal, generational, and deeply laughable? Is it our God-given destiny to produce an era-defining lineup of productions that can redefine the retellings of these awkward stages of life for each generation? If the first wave of coming-of-age comedies captured the chaos of becoming an adult, this new wave captures the chaos of realizing you’ll never stop becoming one. And maybe that’s the most grueling, giggle-inspiring portrait of growing up television has ever given us.