New Girl
Okay, before I talk about this show, I have to get some things off my chest. I hate Zooey Deschanel. There, I said it. It feels so good to say out loud. Whew! Now, before you start arguing with me and trying to tell me how “adorkable” she is, I need to say that I once loved her. All the Real Girls is one of my favorite indie movies, and I think she’s amazing in it. I’m also a fan of her work in Elf, The Good Girl and (500) Days of Summer. So what happened? Well, she became a caricature of herself in a way that became utterly irritating to me. We get it, you’re quirky and you wear vintage-y clothes and you sport a bouffant and fake eyelashes. Ugh!! Enough already!!
With this hatred, I was predisposed to loathe New Girl. However, because I watch Raising Hope, which airs right after this show, and because I’m willing to give any show a try for at least one episode – I even watched the first ep of Last Man Standing – I gave New Girl a try, a trial period, if you will. I didn’t love it at first, nor did I hate it, so I kept watching, hoping it would win me over. And what do you know, it kinda has in the past few weeks, mostly because the show has really, toned down the “adorkability” and actually started to make fun of itself. They’ve also fleshed out the other roommates, notably Schmidt and Nick, so that I have characters on the show that I root for (because I’m definitely not rooting for Jess).
This week’s episode, “Injured,” I especially liked – enough, in fact, to feature it here in the weekly review. I attribute most of my approval to the fact that the episode was Nick-focused, and he is by far my favorite character on the show. Add to the that the theme of hypochondria (a topic I’m quite familiar with) and the acknowledgement that Jess can never be “real” and you have a recipe for one of the best episodes the show has done so far. It seems that the writers have finally figured out how to approach the characters that they have created: Schmidt is the lovable douchebag, Cece is the supposed airhead who has more going on underneath, Winston is the friend who thinks he’s way cooler than he is, Jess is the bizarre non-conformist who views the world as a better place, and Nick…well, Nick is the straight man, the voice of reason, the one I relate to. He’s the Dean Martin to everyone else’s Jerry Lewis, the Abbott to the group’s Costello, the Jim to the rest of The Office. I think that’s why this episode worked so well – for once, it had a solid core (Nick) around which all the crazy stuff could happen without taking the show into the realm of unbelievability.
The actual plot of the episode is not new: Nick hurts his back during a friendly game of football, but, because he doesn’t have insurance, he is coerced into going to Jess’s friend, a gynecologist (played by June Raphael, who I remember most as the no nonsense friend from the movie Going the Distance). There, the doctor finds that Nick has a growth on his thyroid which needs to be ultrasounded (no, that’s not actually a word, but oh well). After a night of drinking and soul-searching later, Nick finds out he’s fine, but not before growing as a person in the process. Simple, right? I know I’ve seen this plot lots of times, but I didn’t really mind. My great uncle, who wrote in the sixties for Star Trek and Bonanza, said that they are only a few stories in TV. You just change the characters and the setting. Well, I have to agree.
That’s not to say that this episode was boring or trite. Not at all. Yeah, it was a little light on humor, but I always like my comedy mixed with heart/sadness (heck, my favorite ep of Scrubs is “My Old Lady” for pete’s sake.), so I was okay with the smaller number of laughs. What I think distinguishes this episode for me, and what makes it blog-worthy, is that this seems to mark the point in the show where the characters have finally become a family. Up until now, they have worked together, fought, meddled, etc., but I think this is the moment where they have become a cohesive group, the formed family that Joss Whedon talks about in all his DVD commentaries. At the very least, it’s the episode where Nick admits that he likes having Jess in his life. And it’s the point where I can actually admit that I like this show, Zooey Deschanel and all.
Other things I enjoyed: Schmidt and Cece are growing on me. The little bit when Schmidt sees the place in the sand where Cece’s butt has made a perfect impression was rather cute. Plus, I think the song that Winston, Schmidt and Cece sang for Nick was pretty awesome, if not a verse or two too long. The scene at the end between Jess and Nick was also quite good. I think it was important for Jess to finally be real after several episodes of bubbly goofiness (ahem, “The Bully”). And I think it was important for Nick to start risking things. I’m interested to see where this realization takes him.
Finally, let’s talk about Winston and his car. This was the funniest element of the show, the comic relief, if you will. Winston has been almost a tertiary character thus far, and I liked that he got his own spotlight bit with his irrational love of his car. “You shouldn’t call them keys—it’s the paperclip you start the car with.” HA!!
Oh, one last thing, did anyone else find the structure of this episode weird? The reveal of Nick’s test results came in the tag when most shows are basically done. Is that a new thing, to shove more story in the last two minutes of the show? They did the same thing on Happy Endings last week with Dave and Alex sleeping together. I hope this isn’t a trend because DVR’s tend to cut these end bits off. Just saying.
Mary the TV Maven 