To offer the understatement of the century: life has been difficult.
Throughout the pandemic, I’ve craved familiar, cozy forms of entertainment. My tired brain hasn’t wanted to wrestle through new plotlines or learn to love new characters. Instead, I’ve returned to old favorites, choosing to tread on well-worn paths that I know and recognize. One of these shows is New Girl.
As someone who followed the series during its original run in 2011, New Girl feels like an old friend. It reminds me of simpler, easier times. As I’ve grown older, it has also become even more relatable. Watching Jess (Zooey Deschanel), Nick (Jake Johnson), and Winston (Lamorne Morris) struggle, attempting to navigate their ever-evolving careers and relationships, has calmed my own anxieties about what, exactly, I’m going to do with the rest of my life. After retiring from soccer, Winston juggles multiple gigs, trying to determine what type of employment he might enjoy in the long-term. Nick works as a bartender for most of the show while sporadically writing a novel that he keeps promising he will finish. And Jess, while firmly tethered to teaching, battles extended periods of unemployment as she seeks out jobs at different schools. They’re often disasters and they always feel like comrades-in-arms throughout the chaos.
As a whole, the writing leans into the idiosyncrasies of each character while drawing out the connections that link them together. Although in his early thirties, Nick acts like a disgruntled man in his seventies. He furrows his brow, annoyed at the sunlight, and trudges around in flannel. When he tries to explain why he doesn’t believe in banks, a delightful stream of nonsense falls out of his mouth. In season three, Jess secretly rifles through a cardboard box Nick keeps in his room and attempts to organize its contents, which include bills and tax forms.
When Nick furiously confronts her, Jess asks him if he truly is a lifeguard.
“No, that is a false certificate. Just a classic beach prank.”
Jess looks at him. “That seems dangerous.”
“It’s funny, ‘cause I…I can’t swim. Everyone was watching me and I’m like, ‘I don’t know…’ I was thirteen! I was twenty-six. This is the problem with the box. It’s my private stuff.”
If I had to pare Nick down to his essentials, I would call him an anthropomorphic collection of millennial memes.
Of course, a brilliant contrast in comedy ensues whenever he argues with Jess, a cartoon character in glasses who loves wearing polka dot dresses. Refreshingly, Jess has not been slotted into the “straight man” role, raising her eyebrows in deadpan distress as Nick or Winston run around the apartment yelling about Ferguson the chunky orange cat. Instead, she is equally bizarre. When Nick runs into her room to go through her boxes, he opens her bedside drawer and, disgusted, scoops out a handful of unshelled peanuts. “What are you, a zoo elephant?”
Jess responds defensively, “Those are my night peanuts.”
“There shouldn’t be day peanuts and night peanuts! They’re just peanuts!”
“I’m sorry, why is that weird?”
“You just have a bunch of boxes? I would change that. Oh, you have a bunch of metal toothpicks.”
“They’re bobby pins.”
“What’s a bobby pin?”
“It keeps your hair back.”
“You need Bobby’s pins to put your hair up?”
“It’s bobby pins not Bobby’s pins.”
Nick looks under her bed and pulls out a comically large spool of yarn, bigger than his head. “What is this?”
“Yarn.”
“What are you knitting, a mansion?”
Frequently, the core cast does not make any sense. Yet, this type of humor excels largely because the actors commit to two critical components: line delivery and physical comedy. The unexpected verbal inflections and wild body movements cohere into scenes that inspire laughter, especially when it is unclear what is happening. In one episode, after the entire loft erupts into loud arguments, Winston walks into the living room, impatient. Speaking as “Theodore K. Mullins,” his alter ego, he dramatically deepens his voice like a revivalist preacher and launches into a speech eviscerating their foolish antics. It is a wildly strange moment that ends with Winston sniffing his nose at the group and walking away with his bowl of breakfast cereal.
It’s a show that appreciates the eccentric dynamics among friends who know each other really, really well. They’re not afraid to call each other out for strange or damaging behavior—and they often do so in a way that is similarly strange and accidentally damaging. Despite their quirks, they all remain loyal friends. Incredibly protective of Jess and her Kewpie-doll eyes, Cece (Hannah Simone), a confident model, is frequently ready to fight anyone and anything who makes her friend cry. While she has perfected the cool, poker-faced persona, she also engages in silly hijinks and encourages the more impulsive aspects of Jess’s personality. They’re always comfortable around each other and have no qualms about shaving each other’s armpits in the communal bathroom. They are friends who know each other, intrinsically, without fault. And love is in the knowing.
If you’ve noticed I haven’t mentioned Schmidt (Max Greenfield), well, there’s a reason for that.
I loathe him.
I always end up fast-forwarding through his scenes because most of his comments fluctuate rapidly between racism and sexism, usually played for laughs. He is the weak link on the show. He is the reason I sometimes contemplate not watching New Girl anymore. He is, after all, a product of the show creators and writers.
Upon meeting Cece, who identifies as Indian-American, he quickly falls back on overtly objectifying and fetishizing her body. Even when he “falls in love” with her, his incessant stream of offensive commentary does not abate. If he truly respected Cece, he would treat her as a human, not as a sex object. He wouldn’t call her “spicy,” ask her if she can “feel heat or not,” and then package these damaging comments as compliments. He wouldn’t call her breasts “Harold and Kumar.” The show passes off Schmidt’s words as nothing more than bad jokes, something his friends roll their eyes at and point to the Douchebag Jar for coins.
“Why are you like this?” Nick asks. It’s a question, but it’s one we are supposed to laugh at, regardless of whether or not it is actually funny. No one ever directly confronts Schmidt about his misogyny or his racism. Instead, they all simply shake their heads, thinking “Classic Schmidt,” and we, too, are conditioned to accept his personality as set in stone, something that doesn’t have to be changed. Even worse, his overtures eventually woo Cee, who does, indeed, fall in love with him.
She deserved better. She always, always deserved better. And Schmidt deserved a punch in the face.
I can’t turn off my brain if a show says my autonomy is a joke. If it says I am a joke. If it says my friends are jokes. It doesn’t make me feel good. It makes me feel worthless. And I think it is a privilege to be able to brush aside these hurtful “jokes” and to insist that everyone should know they were “just kidding.” And it’s not funny when these jokes inflict real damage on real people in real life. In college, a close friend of mine told me that, after having to deal with boys who had self-proclaimed “Yellow Fever” her freshman year, she often distrusted attention from men. She had to carefully assess their intentions. She was wary of trusting someone who might ultimately dehumanize her.
Part of me was hesitant to write this essay because I know that many other people consider New Girl their comfort show. I didn’t want to seem like a wet blanket, like I lacked a sense of humor. But I realize how deeply unfair this fear is to myself and to other women who feel like their worth is being turned into a punchline.
We are imperfect people who are allowed to like imperfect things. Like I said, at the end of the day, I still hold deep affection for New Girl and I’ve re-watched episodes (particularly Season 2) many, many times. But it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. I can enjoy New Girl while also critiquing its weak spots. I can love Nick and Jess and Winston and Cece while also condemning the writing that makes light of real-world problems in a flippant, lazy way.
That’s what consuming media is all about: it’s holding all of these contradictory sentiments in our brains, sloshing around in neon-green jars of brain juice, and being able to say, You know what, that’s actually fucked-up and I don’t have to act like it isn’t. In fact, it’s important that we don’t. It’s important that we call out problematic writing for what it is, instead of capitulating to a pop culture gaslighting that says sexism isn’t sexism or racism isn’t racism just because it’s an easier thing to do—for certain people, of course. None of this is easy for those of us trained to nod our heads and smile at our own marginalization. We don’t have to clap just because white men (and women) are telling us to clap.
As Rebecca Solnit writes, “You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.”
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