New Girl: The Little Show That Could Has Found Its Groove
I resisted New Girl at first. I mean, I actively detested this show and totally wrote it off before even giving it a proper shot. It’s mostly because I am allergic to whatever hipster-nonsense/child-adult-bullshit Zooey Deschanel is trying to sell us. The title is as polarizing as she is, and it just didn’t look appealing. As time went on, I was told to watch it by everyone whose opinion I trust, so, over the summer, I decided to watch the entire first season. I watched all 24 episodes in one weekend.
New Girl is very much the same as every other sitcom on television. As much as I love these shows, New Girl/Happy Endings/Suburgatory/How I Met Your Mother, etc… they are, more or less, the same show (or they have similar intentions and themes). Now, I don’t really brag all that much that I watch it because it’s called New Girl, which is a shame because not only is it 2012 and we should be above this but also because it’s really good. And this is the beauty of New Girl: I can watch the show, love the show, love Zooey ON the show, but actively dislike her once the 22 minute episode is done.
New Girl’s first season started off well enough. It was fine, if mediocre, with some great episodes and some not so great. Then, halfway through the season, the show found who it was; it toned down Zooey’s Zooeyness (and I feel like it began to mock her public persona a little?), included the guys much more often, and became a well-rounded show about these 4 mismatched Friends. I capitalized Friends because while Happy Endings or How I Met Your Mother seem more similar, I find New Girl to be more in the vein of what Friends aspired to do and succeeded in doing; being a great sitcom about friendship. If you resisted this show like myself, I recommend you watch the first season. Stick by it during the first few episodes and then you’ll notice the shift in quality. There are some genuinely hilarious episodes during season 1.
I decided to write a piece on the show because this week’s episode really solidified that the show has found it’s groove. An episode dealing with PMS could’ve been so cliché and so obvious and it could’ve fallen into the sitcomy-ness of it all and the stereotypes, but it didn’t, it avoided them and went about making this episode more than it should’ve been about. Each character dealt with their versions of PMS (Nick’s anger issues, Winston dealing with the male version of it, Schmidt being Schmidt and Jess actually having it) and, in turn, we saw this alarming moment of character development. New Girl had a moment of clarity and delivered an almost perfect episode of television. It’s an episode I’ve already revisited since originally watching it. I’ve only done that two other times this year: Happy Ending’s premiere and that amazing episode of Parks & Rec. You know which one.
Jess’s not having a job thing could’ve so easily been resolved but it wasn’t and it was given a great treatment. The guys didn’t have to help her out of her rut and force her to go the interview (the scene where she cried about the Tea Cup Dog was brilliant “I Just don’t, physically, understand how it fits into the cup. How did she get so small?”). Winston continues to be the show’s underdog while proving to be just as engaging a character as the other 3. And then there was Nick. Nick, who is the fictional version of myself, was given such an interesting story. It could’ve gone two very obvious ways but it ended up going somewhere strange, funny and genuine. His moments with the silent Asian man were endearing and silly and the way it helped tie the entire episode together was very sweet and very, very New Girl.
This show is obviously comparable to similar shows that came before it and are it’s competition but at the same time, I find it to be completely refreshing, much more genuine and inspired than anything else on TV, and just a very good sitcom that could become a great one.