Re-watching New Girl

Sometimes all you need is watching silly people doing silly things

I love sitcoms. Will & Grace, Friends, How I met your Mother, Modern Family, Seinfeld, The Middle…They are 30 minutes of easy-going fun.

Lately, I started re-watching New Girl, and it has been shaping up surprisingly well. Unlike all the other sitcoms I cited before, I only viewed most episodes of New Girl once, while it was airing from 2011-2018. That differs greatly from a show like Friends, which I've watched so many times that I know some of the lines by heart.

Although I know where the story is heading, I have forgotten most of the jokes and punchlines. Happily, it's like watching a brand-new show.

New Girl tells the story of Jessica Day, played by actress/singer Zooey Deschanel. After being cheated on by her boyfriend, she has to live in an apartment with 3 single male roommates. There's something quite crazy about each of them, in their own way. Nick Miller (Jake Johnson) is sensitive but avoids responsibility at all costs, Schmidt (Max Greenfield) is a complete douchebag and Winston Bishop (Lamorne Morris) is sweet but weird.

The show's premise is that the guys would have a hard time adjusting to an overly sensitive and feminine female roommate. But as the show progresses and the chemistry between the actors and their characters improves, we see that Jess is much saner than her male counterparts. She is the one that has to adjust to their quirkiness. Their dynamic, in the end, creates a fun, and dysfunctional family.

Although it has a bit of the same dynamics as another famous sitcom from the same period, The Big Bang Theory, where a hot new girl appears in the lives of male friends, it is much less problematic than the first. While you could argue that in The Big Bang Theory the guys harass Penny constantly and diminish her, Jess is on a much more even playing field. Still, Jessica's model best friend Cece (Hannah Simone) is objectified in very uncomfortable ways in a few scenes throughout most of the first 3 seasons.

Zooey Deschanel

There's a lot of uncalled hate toward Zooey Deschanel. I suppose some of it comes from the movie 500 Days of Summer, in which people still don't really get that she is not the villain. There's also this narrative that she is a real-life Manic Pixie Girl. This trope is used in movies where a common guy, lost in his ways, finds a different, spontaneous, and quirky love interest that transforms his life.

Because the actress seems to act and dress up in real life exactly like her characters, many think that she is just like them as well. Which is unfair. As she put it in an interview with The Guardian:

It doesn’t hurt my feelings, but it’s a way of making a woman one-dimensional and I’m not one-dimensional.

Re-watching the show I can't help but find Zooey quite funny. Like her colleagues, she is constantly making fun of herself and even using physical humor at times. Even at the start of the show, when critics said she was too over the top, I still find it quite relatable to see her on the sofa watching Dirty Dance over and over again after a breakup.

Maybe the gratuitous hate comes from the fact that she is really feminine in a cute way and that is not supposed to be funny.

Her character Jess is the only one that doesn't develop much throughout the show, but that's because although quirky she seems to be the sane one in the apartment. She is the only one (and maybe Winston?) that can reflect and notice when things are not working well. She's in touch with her feelings and knows which direction to go in, even if it means making lots of mistakes along the way.

If you haven't watched New Girl, or you want to come back to it, you should. Without TV commercials it's only 22 uncompromised minutes of laughing over the mistakes and misunderstandings of 5 silly people.

The show is a wonderful entertainment option because of its focus on friendship and quick, sometimes over-the-top jokes. The characters on New Girl are bold, at times bordering on cartoonish, but the creators are self-aware, and Schmidt's annoying inclinations are restrained by the "douchebag jar," which is essentially a curse jar for when he acts like, well, you get the idea. The fact that Jess also has an "annoyance bowl" in season two demonstrates the writers' openness to considering the viewpoints of their audience. This skill seems to have contributed to New Girl's success and survival through 7 seasons.