A smugly enamored couple sit in a restaurant, their hands clasped as they fret over the menu. The chicken, for instance: can the waitress tell them a little bit about its provenance? Of course she can, because this is the kind of cool restaurant in Portland, Oregon, where patrons regularly seek elaborate assurances about the virtuousness of their food. The waitress informs the couple that the place serves only local, free-range, “heritage-breed, woodland-raised chicken that’s been fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts.” But because the diners, Peter and Nance, are characters on “Portlandia”—a television comedy in which precious concerns spin into giddy lunacy—the conversation does not stop there. Peter, played by Fred Armisen, asks if the hazelnuts, too, are local. Nance, played by Carrie Brownstein, needs to know the size of the parcel of land where the chicken roamed freely. (Four acres.) The waitress excuses herself and returns to the table with a file folder and a photograph. “Here is the chicken you’ll be enjoying tonight,” she says, with therapeutic solemnity. “His name was Colin.” Peter seems appeased: “He looks like a happy little guy who runs around.” But then he wonders if the animal had “a lot of friends—other chickens as friends?” The waitress, who finds this a reasonable question, admits, “I don’t know that I can speak to that level of intimate knowledge about him.”

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen have an unusually devoted platonic relationship. Photograph by Gabriele Stabile

“Portlandia,” which débuted last winter, on the Independent Film Channel, and returns on January 6th, is the rare sketch-comedy series that has a sustained object of satire. It’s about life in hipster enclaves, and the self-consciousness that makes hipsters desperately disavow the label. Many of its characters are caught up in the prideful culture of D.I.Y. entrepreneurship, in which people reject office jobs in favor of becoming, say, an appliqué-pillow designer with a page on Etsy. (This season, a couple launch a business based on the catchphrase “We can pickle that!,” brining everything from eggs at an urban farm to a broken high heel found on the sidewalk.) “Portlandia” is an extended joke about what Freud called the narcissism of small differences: the need to distinguish oneself by minute shadings and to insist, with outsized militancy, on the importance of those shadings.

Brownstein, who is also one of the show’s writers and producers, told me, “In general, things in a place like Portland are really great, so little concerns become ridiculous. There are a lot of people here who can afford—financially but also psychologically—to be really, really concerned about buying local, for instance. It becomes mock epic. It’s like Alexander Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock.’ I was standing in line at Whole Foods, and the guy in front of me says, ‘I really wish you guys sold locally made fresh pasta.’ And the cashier says, ‘Look, we do.’ And the guy says, ‘No, no—that’s from Seattle.’ Really? You don’t have a bigger battle?”

“Portlandia” presents a heightened version of the city’s twee urbanity: a company sells artisanal light bulbs, a hotel offers a manual typewriter to every guest, and a big local event is the Allergy Pride Parade. The mayor, played by Kyle MacLachlan, becomes an object of scandal when he’s “outed” as the bass guitarist in a middle-of-the-road reggae band. (The real Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, who is openly gay, plays MacLachlan’s assistant on the show.) Armisen and Brownstein, wearing anthropologically precise wigs and outfits, portray most of the main characters: bicycle-rights activists, dumpster divers, campaigners against any theoretical attempt to bring the Olympics to Portland, animal lovers so out of touch that they free a pet dog tied up outside a restaurant. (“Who puts their dog on a pole like a stripper?”) Many characters recur, and, because they often seem to know one another, their intersections from sketch to sketch give the show the feel of a grownup “Sesame Street.” This childlike vibe has an edge to it, however; as an Armisen character explains at one point, Portland is “where young people go to retire.”

Armisen, who is forty-five, is a seasoned comic actor who has been in the cast of “Saturday Night Live” since 2002, but Brownstein’s involvement in “Portlandia” is surprising. She had never done comedy before collaborating with Armisen, and, in many ways, she is the epitome of the indie culture that the show sends up. For twelve years, Brownstein, now thirty-seven, was a guitarist and singer in Sleater-Kinney, a three-woman band from Olympia, Washington. Sleater-Kinney drew on the riot-grrrl sound but transcended it; the band’s energy was raw and punky, its vocals haunting and its lyrics vehement. In 2001, the critic Greil Marcus named Sleater-Kinney the best rock band in America, and when it went on indefinite hiatus, five years later, the news triggered many end-of-an-era laments. Last year, Brownstein started a new band, Wild Flag, with the drummer from Sleater-Kinney, Janet Weiss, and two other indie-rock eminences, Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole. The group’s first album, released in September, has been widely praised; Rolling Stone said that Wild Flag “makes other bands sound like sniffly rookies.” Urban Outfitters sells the record, on vinyl.

When Brownstein plays music, there is nothing ironic about her. The first time that we sat down to talk, at a restaurant in Portland’s loft-filled Pearl District, she said, “I’ve never understood people who play up the artifice of music. Music, for me, was like a tidal wave. It took me outside of anything I’d ever done.” She had been an isolated teen-ager, and punk was “a salvation,” she said. “You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness.”

Brownstein is petite, with chin-length dark-brown hair and a wide mouth. Offstage, in jeans, striped T-shirts, and sneakers, she looks more cute than commanding. Onstage, she projects the primal grandeur of Iggy Pop. She writhes on the floor, climbs on the kick drum, and windmills her playing arm. She yelps and shouts, and hiccups just like Joey Ramone. “She brought all that posturing and posing to girl rock, which would be nothing if she didn’t write great songs and play guitar like a demon,” Brendan Canty, the drummer for the band Fugazi, who is a friend, says. “She was a straight-out-of-the-box rock star.” Sometimes this side of Brownstein appears on “Portlandia”—when one of her characters needs to freak out, she delivers a great howl. But it’s a howl of thwarted entitlement. The show is offering satire, not salvation.

Brownstein likes to say that “Portlandia” is an affectionate portrait of the city where she has lived for the past decade. The warmth is not in the writing, which leans toward the acerbic, but you can find it in other places, like the show’s dreamy look. In the opening-credit sequence, a chillwave instrumental plays over a montage of lush, tree-lined streets and saturated neon against an inky blue sky. It’s a little like Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”—the imagery evokes a world you’d like to live in, even if the people in it are hard to live with. The characters in “Portlandia” are dressed with an eye toward recognition, not ridicule. Brownstein says that when she puts on the outfits picked for her by the show’s costume designer, Amanda Needham, she feels as if she were “borrowing clothes from someone’s closet.” Needham, who told me that she shops for the “Portlandia” characters year-round, as if they were friends, won an Emmy last year for her designs.

But the most palpable affection onscreen is that between Armisen and Brownstein, who have an unusually devoted platonic relationship. They met in 2003, when Sleater-Kinney was playing in New York City, and Armisen invited the band to an “S.N.L.” after-party. When Brownstein showed up, she found him wearing a Sleater-Kinney button with her picture on it. Their paths had probably crossed before: Armisen started out his performing life as the drummer in a Chicago punk band called Trenchmouth, and he was married for six years to the British singer and songwriter Sally Timms, from the Mekons. Brownstein says that she and Armisen likely slept on some of the same couches when both were touring. (“If you were in an indie band in the nineties, you slept on a lot of couches.”) After that party in New York, Brownstein and Armisen began building a friendship, but, given that they were living on opposite coasts, they decided that they’d have to work on something together. As she put it, when you’re not dating somebody, “it begins to seem kind of weird if you’re flying around the country to see him.”

It’s easy to see why Armisen and Brownstein clicked. Both are hard workers with little tolerance for downtime. Both are music obsessives, with an encyclopedic knowledge of B-sides. Neither has children, or seems likely to have any, though they’re sweet to their friends’ kids. They shudder at the thought of becoming bitter or cynical. Both describe themselves as having been difficult, or restive, in romantic relationships. Armisen was married first to Timms, and then, for less than a year, to Elizabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olson on “Mad Men.” Brownstein has dated both men and women, and she was once involved with Corin Tucker, the singer and guitarist with whom she founded Sleater-Kinney. But she hates categories like “bisexual,” and has always felt more defined by her work than by her relationships. “I never think of sexuality as an identifier,” Brownstein wrote in an e-mail. “What seems to have defined me more is that I’m pretty horrible at relationships and haven’t been in many long-term ones. Leaving and moving on—returning to a familiar sense of self-reliance and autonomy—is what I know; that feeling is as comfortable and comforting as it might be for a different kind of person to stay.”

When Sleater-Kinney broke up, Brownstein threw herself into other creative activities, partly because she was grieving the loss of the band and partly because she was fearful of being the kind of person whose finest years were in her twenties. She started writing a blog about music, for the Web site of National Public Radio, an enterprise that she kept up for three years; she also started writing a book, “The Sound of Where You Are,” about the current state of music-making, which is scheduled for publication in 2013. Thinking that an office job might be a good thing to try, she did a six-month stint at Wieden+Kennedy—the modish Portland ad agency responsible for Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. (The agency’s playcentric workplace has been spoofed on “Portlandia.”) But working at an ad agency proved alienating, she said, because of the way “the work mimics art.” She added, “Music, to me, is an earnest populist endeavor and this was a cynical populist one.” During that period, she stopped playing the guitar, even at home; it felt too sad, like “putting your wedding ring back on after a divorce.” She spent so much time helping out at the Oregon Humane Society that she was honored as Volunteer of the Year. Then she remembered how much she liked acting.

As a child growing up in Redmond, Washington—the Seattle suburb where Microsoft has its headquarters—Brownstein loved putting on plays. The idea of gathering people in the same room, attentive to the same thing, appealed to her, as did the “staging of small dramas with a beginning, a middle, and an end I could control.” She was also reacting to an emotionally chaotic household. When Brownstein was fourteen, her mother, who was deeply unhappy, left the family—Carrie has a younger sister, who is now a private investigator in Seattle—and has stayed in only intermittent contact with them over the years. Brownstein’s father, a corporate lawyer, brought up the girls. Brownstein remains fairly close to her father, but was taken aback when, a few years ago, he came out as gay and began living with a younger man. Her dad had been a typical suburbanite, she said, who “veered a little conservative.” He is now “way more liberal, more outgoing, he laughs more. It’s like meeting a new person.” Though she has welcomed this transformation, it “casts doubts on what your own childhood meant.” She said, “It’s kind of hard to think that that was him in a period of denial. Just when you think that everything that’s going to inform the rest of your life has sort of settled in, it’s, like, ‘No, there’s one more thing.’ ”

As a teen-ager, Brownstein discovered the Clash and the Jam, and bought a guitar with money she had saved from babysitting and working at a multiplex. In 1993, she enrolled at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, where there was a rich alternative-music and feminist scene. Brownstein fell in with the riot-grrrl crowd—bands like Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, and Bratmobile—and eventually joined forces with Tucker, who was two years older. Though Brownstein became a musician, she didn’t forget acting. “She’d always had this interest in it,” Tucker, who remains a close friend, recalls. “She had an improv group in Olympia. But it was like your friend who has this weird hobby. You know—some people are into trains? She was into improv. It wasn’t that cool, in the context.”

In 2002, in Portland, Brownstein and her friend Miranda July, the writer, actress, and filmmaker, started a group to study acting. “It was a very Portland approach,” July recalls. “We got this group of friends together—maybe ten people, meeting at each other’s houses. One of us would go to the library and get a book and bring in an acting exercise and present it to the class, and then we’d all do it. It was the sort of thing that could never have happened in L.A. None of us knew anything and there was no teacher. But I think Carrie and I both actually kept a lot of that feeling with the acting we went on to do.”

And then Armisen came along. He did know what he was doing, and he suggested to Brownstein that they make some videos for the Internet. They called their enterprise ThunderAnt and developed some of the characters and situations—notably, the feminist bookstore—that are now mainstays of “Portlandia.” ThunderAnt was something they did chiefly for fun, but by the time they had ten fairly polished sketches Armisen thought that they might have a show to pitch. In 2010, they signed a deal with Broadway Video, a company run by Lorne Michaels, who produces “Saturday Night Live,” and approached IFC, which was looking to create some comedies. Jennifer Caserta, the executive vice-president of IFC, who launched its current slogan—“Always On. Slightly Off”—says that the channel was “turning to smaller comedy clubs, YouTube, and other viral sensations, looking for something less polished, freer, maybe more improvisational than you would see in situation comedies.” IFC took on the show, and “Portlandia” has become its biggest hit, with an audience of more than five million. “It was so crystal-clear to Fred and Carrie what the show was,” Michaels says. “It’s their own aesthetic. With ‘S.N.L.,’ between dress and air, there’s a lot of edit work that goes into it, and earlier, too. I’m all over that. But I wouldn’t second-guess this.”