Abbi & Ilana Are Bringing Sex and the City/Broad City Fan Fiction Alive For Season Three

In a parallel universe, it’s possible to imagine Carrie Bradshaw being shocked at what twenty-something New York City women have become since her heyday (even though she was already appalled back then, as evidenced by the episode “Twenty-Something Girls vs. Thirty-Something Women”). Case in point, Abbi Abrams (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana Wexler (Ilana Glazer). But now, rather than imagining the universes of Broad City and Sex and the City colliding, we can see it for ourselves, even if it’s only in the form of a small cameo appearance by Cynthia Nixon, as revealed by the trailer for season three.

A brief scene of Ilana repeating her catch phrase, “Yas, yas, yas, yas, yas” in a conference room where Cynthia Nixon as an unnamed character is speaking provides us with little information. Who knows? Maybe she’s the new CEO of Deals! Deals! Deals!. Whatever the reason for her presence, this coalescing of two quintessential yet very different New York experiences has me wondering (the Bradshaw tone is deliberate here), “Is Lena Dunham jealous as fuck?” As any watcher of New York-based shows knows, Girls has always prided itself on being the self-proclaimed successor to what Sex and the City meant to young women trying to “find themselves” (read: a dick) in the city.

But for one of the four iconic characters to choose Broad City over the schlock that Dunham has been peddling is telling of the former’s cachet and veracity. Although the antics on the show seem, to outsiders, surreal, anyone who has spent more than a year trying to navigate NYC has learned that anything is possible–no matter how unbelievable. It would be nice to think that Nixon is reprising her role as Miranda to tell Abbi and Ilana that they really ought to have more dignity and that, in her day, she was already working at a prestigious law firm at their age. But alas, that might cause the TV universe to implode. At best, we can hope she’s playing a lawyer.