Review: FOX's New Girl

Or Getting Beyond "Adorkable"

New Girl premieres tonight at 9/8c on FOX. As such, the following review is spoiler-free, and can be read without worry.

FOX obviously has a lot riding on New Girl as the comedy to help fill in that hour between Glee and the local news (and to hopefully act as a better follow-up than Raising Hope ever did). The ads for the show – which unfortunately only use footage from tonight’s pilot – permeate the airwaves not just on FOX, but on the sister stations as well. They also released the pilot two weeks early for download (and a week later on Hulu) in an attempt to drum up interest. And that’s to say nothing of all the billboards, bus banner, and general print and online ads that are bound to be out there. (I don’t live in a major metropolitan area, so that last one in hard to gauge.) Yet despite all these measures, it’s clear that FOX is most banking on the mere presence of Zooey Deschanel to bring in the viewers.

It’s not a bad plan, really. Deschanel is quite a fetching woman, and her geeky yet adorable persona obviously appeals to sizeable and fervent subset of men. (My own personal soft spot for her comes from the fact that she played Trillian in the film version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Admittedly the script didn’t give the character much to do, but still. She was Trillian, and that’s enough.) And that’s what worries me about how the series is going to proceed. Regardless of however Deschanel got the job – whether she auditioned for it, or if the show was developed based on some contract she had with the network, I can’t tell – there is something about her presence on the show that feels so calculated, and the show itself seems so geared towards the Deschanel persona, that I get worried about how the rest of the series is going to pan out.

Deschanel plays Jess, a woman who, upon finding out that her boyfriend was cheating on her, moves out and ends up living in an apartment with three guys, played with aplomb by Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, and (at least in the pilot) Damon Wayans, Jr., as Nick, Schmidt, and Coach, respectively. The series has been advertised with the disgustingly cute portmanteau “adorkable”, as it’s clear that FOX wants you to buy that this is Deschanel’s show, and in many respects it is. The show’s theme was co-written and performed by Deschanel, and utilizes lines that her character says, and it’s her plight that is clearly meant to drive the show. Thus, for at least the first batch of episode, one can make the safe bet that every A-plot will be about Jess.

Yet – and I am saying this in no uncertain terms – Deschanel is not the best part of the pilot, and that’s something not even my soft spot for the actress can hide. I don’t want to say that anything about Jess as a character or Deschanel’s performance is bad; in fact it’s quite good, assuming you don’t find anything objectionable about this sort of Manic Pixie Dream Girl role, which is frankly holds about the same level of MPDG-ness as all of her other roles, just proportionally amped up in order to fit the comedic tableau. The main complaint here is that the role here feels designed just for Deschanel (and again, it very well could have been), which sometimes leads to the show overplaying her MPDG qualities, and it ends up feeling more manufactured at times, to the point that Jess isn’t a person so much as a collections of quirks. This is something that most comedies struggle with early on – and admittedly all of the other characters are equally underdeveloped – but given what’s apparent from FOX’s marketing strategy, the network very well may try to stunt any character growth, to the point where the show gets locked into dealing with this same version of Jess over and over again.  

So then what does work for the show? The real treasure here are the three male characters, and it’s something that I hope the show learns to cultivate sooner rather than later. The biggest laughs of the pilot come from them, especially within the first 5 minutes as Nick, Schmidt and Coach are allowed to bounce off of each other in a tit-for-tat, fast-paced-conversation sort of way. (It’s also telling that Deschanel/Jess is at her funniest when she enters into similar exchanges with any of the guys.) I don’t doubt that there will inevitably be an episode where the A-plot centers around of the guys – that’s just how these sitcoms tend to evolve, and there’s already a few seeds planted in the pilot that could grow into full-fledged stories for each character – but how the show handles it is key. If they just have the characters hang in the background and only interact with Jess when it’s time for Deschanel to make a funny, any sudden attempt to have them act like real characters will feel cheap. However, if the show uses these actors for the comedic and narrative potential they have now, it will not only make the spotlight transition smoother, it will also make each episode before it much stronger.

The plot, if you could call it that, runs fairly loose and ramshackle, and I think it’s rather a boon’s to the shows energy. In the past few years, there has been a resurgence of “hang-out sitcoms”, where not a whole lot seems to happen in any given episode, but the audience has a good time just hanging out with the characters. (Think Cougar Town.) While New Girl isn’t at that stage yet – the network and the show are still clearly too invested in the “Jess learns about dating or life or whatever” angle – it’s a show that could very easily make such a lateral move. If the show did so, I believe that the focus would naturally shift from Deschanel-in-the-lead to more of an ensemble comedy (similar to the transition Cougar Town undertook when it stopped being about Jules and became more about The Cul-De-Sac Crew), and any move that gives the guys a large role would make the show stronger overall. Please understand that I am not advocating for a more-dude oriented show – I tend to hate “dude comedies” and I do like Deschanel’s presence – but rather that I am asking for show that is more varies by giving different comedic creations equal play.

FOX’s current slogan is “So brash, so bold, so FOX”, and regardless of whether you think the whole of FOX’s programs could be described as either brash or bold (or if you have problems with “FOX” being used as an adjective), New Girl is none of those things. It’s ultimately a fairly sweet show, an attitude that will probably help it do well in the timeslot after Glee. But this isn’t about whether New Girl will survive; it’s about whether it will become a show worth sticking around for. And whether it seeks out such improvement is something that only time will tell.

Other Thoughts:

At one point, this show was definitely called The New Girl. Now it’s just New Girl. I don’t know why the network decided to drop that definitive article, but I don’t like it. New Girl just feels too short of a title, and The New Girl seemed to be expressing something, well, definitive about Deschanel’s character, and I quite liked that.

Oh, there’s one other character introduced here, Jess’ model friend Cece, who gets even less to do than the guys, and frankly didn’t do anything that the guys couldn’t have done. She’s just there so that Schmidt can drool over a model, and it’s something I hope that show drops quickly, as it has no real narrative place or momentum. (Tellingly, she isn’t even present in most of the paper advertisement, and she is given one line in the TV spots.) Sorry, Hannah Simone, but you can look pretty just about anywhere.

Final casting note: Though Wayans is in the pilot, he will not appear in future episodes due to his commitment to Happy Endings. Instead, the second episode will have some dialogue that writes Coach out and writes in Winston, played by Lamorne Morris. Thought it feels weird that the show clearly feels the needs to have one black actor in the bunch – and once again, I can’t tell if this is a script issue or a network mandate – personally I’m just glad that the show didn’t swap actors for the same part and hoped that no one would notice. However, given that Coach is the least defined character for the group, maybe it’s for the best, and creator Elizabeth Merwether can have a chance to make a stronger black character the second time around.