The CBS sit-com 2 Broke Girls – aired for six seasons from 2011 to 2017 – represented a watershed in Kat Dennings’ career. Up to that moment she had been consolidating a resume as ‘indie rising star’ with a gallery of rebellious and emotionally-complex leading characters – for example, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist (2008) or Daydream Nation (2010) – interspersed with comedic supporting roles in mainstream films – for example, The House Bunny (2008). And when she landed the principal role of Max Black in the CBS show she had two very different films in the pipeline: on the one hand To Write Love on Her Arms (2012), an indie drama about addiction and depression; on the other hand, the supporting comic-relief role in the Marvel kolossal Thor (2011). Dennings brought to 2 Broke Girl this dual screen-persona that she had been honing: talented dramatic actress plus witty comedian. The mix soon proved too complex to handle for a sit-com, particularly for a conservative/traditional one like 2 Broke Girls that neither sought the formal experimentations of Arrested Development nor would manage to give its characters the depth and development arc as The Big Bang Theory managed to. 

Throughout the six seasons, the Max Black character made a journey from complexity to simplicity. In Season One Max is a young woman with a traumatic childhood, working two minimum-wage jobs and still struggling to make the ends meet, hiding her desperation behind a facade of cynicism and sarcasm. In Season Six Max has turned into a hollower stand-up-comedian-like type, a stereotypical street-smart slacker dispensing one-liners about booze, sex, and her own breasts. The writers kept the facade and dropped the inner anguish that was originally hidden behind it. Dennings gradually had to flatten out her original multifaceted persona into a more mono-dimensional type. The paper surveys this transformation process across the show, tracing how this ‘involution’ and ‘flattening’ may have been determined by the constraints of the traditional live-audience multi-camera sit-com format, as well as by some overly-formulaic writing and short-sighted decisions in both the planning of the multi-season development and in the design of the character arc – which might have had some weight in the eventual cancellation of the show.