While you wait for the next season of Broad City, here’s a new web series that’s also about two 20-something BFFs muddling through life in the big city. Except Ellpetha and Camilo, the anti-heroes of This Is Me Trying, are even more jaded than Abbi and Ilana (as in, stealing-the-pants-off-a-homeless-guy jaded).
The web series grew out of a Kickstarter campaign launched by creators Ellpetha Tsivicos and Camilo Quiroz-Vazquez, who met before graduating from NYU and now run a burgeoning production company together.
Rather than setting their series in ever trendy Brooklyn a la Bushwick Elucidations, the duo opted to keep it in the East Village — the “beloved neighborhood” of which they’re “passionate fans,” per their bio. In fact they describe their characters as “trying to navigate through a sea of idiots and living that East Village life.”
You might find some of the humor in the first two episodes a little too “dark and raunchy, just like NYC” (i.e. fisting and rape, the aforementioned robbery of a corpse), but hey, at least they resist the 9/11 joke. And the third episode — in which we meet Pepino, the roommates’ pet garbage bag — is pretty inspired. Watch it below, after you’ve watched the first two installments above. And follow the show on YouTube or via its site