Portlandia skewers a locavore culture where sensitive patrons feel compelled, before devouring a free-range chicken, to visit the farm where it was raised (Brownstein and Armisen's characters did that in an amusing first-season skit). And it captures the horror of living in a city filled with would-be tastemakers where everyone, including your mother, has his or her own DJ night.
Brownstein and Armisen - who were depicted recently in the New Yorker as having such an intensely platonic relationship that they text each other before going to bed every night - began their comic collaboration with a series of Internet-released videos. The video series, under the name ThunderAnt, grew into Portlandia, which premiered on IFC in January 2011.
Both Armisen and Brownstein have musical connections. He played drums in the early 1990s in the Chicago punk band Trenchmouth; Brownstein, who was one-third of the great riot-grrl band Sleater-Kinney, became a music blogger for National Public Radio and then a founder of Wild Flag. The duo will bring "Portlandia: The Tour" to Philadelphia on Feb. 19, at the Trocadero. (Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Thursday; for more information go to www.thetroc.com.) Brownstein will return in rock mode to play the Troc with Wild Flag on April 13.
Portlandia's wicked, straight- faced humor is never heartless. But it can be kind of mean, as in an episode airing next Friday when it mocks the militant and bad-facial-haired bike messenger Spyke as he plans his "cool wedding" to his equally unlikable fiancee, Iris.
