New Girl’s evolution from “adorkable” to sitcom gold, in 10 steps

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http://www.avclub.com/article/new-gi...0-steps-242556

New Girl could enjoy a 20-season reign at the top of the Nielsen ratings, and the Fox sitcom would still be haunted by two words: “Simply adorkable.” Affixed to a photo of series star Zooey Deschanel demonstrating the International Sign for whimsy—shoulders slightly hunched, coyly avoiding eye contact, a smile that says “Mischief’s afoot!”—the tagline was a poor introduction for an Emmy-nominated hangout comedy about thirtysomething weirdos who are still reinventing themselves long after their peers had settled into adulthood.

But that’s not what the network was marketing. The network was marketing Deschanel, the indie-film (and indie-rock) darling who was only a few years removed from her big-screen breakthrough as the title character in Marc Webb’s (500) Days Of Summer. A fickle, Smiths-loving sprite who only exists to give meaning to the life of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s (500) Days protagonist, Summer was a prime example of a certain, troublingly common cinematic archetype. Who could blame anyone for looking at ads for New Girl and thinking it was actually called Manic Pixie Dream Girl: The TV Series?

But that frequently misused coinage never truly applied to the show, either. Developed from a pilot called Chicks & Dicks, New Girl came from screenwriter and playwright Elizabeth Meriwether, who was fresh off the success of the Natalie Portman-Ashton Kutcher rom-com No Strings Attached. (Working title: ****buddies.) 20th Century Fox Television sparked to the concept of a woman moving in with three men following a breakup, and booked Deschanel for the role of kindhearted-but-blindered Jessica Day. In the first of the show’s many evolutions, Chicks & Dicks became New Girl.

Jess’ fish-out-of-water status and emotional frailty is central to the pilot, where her sunny disposition and sunnier wardrobe clashes with conceited Schmidt (Max Greenfield), hot-headed Coach (Damon Wayans Jr.), and curmudgeonly Nick (Jake Johnson). Coach was replaced with flighty Winston (Lamorne Morris) after the 11th-hour renewal of Happy Endings, and New Girl had all the makings of a potential hit in its first three weeks on the air. A World Series hiatus put a permanent dent in the show’s ratings, but that’s for the best: Out of the heat of the spotlight, New Girl reduced its emphasis on Jess’ idiosyncrasies and started playing up the peculiarities of its entire cast. Greenfield honed Schmidt’s over-enunciations and bizarre pronunciations while Meriwether and the writers molded him into a distinctly 21st-century alpha male: a chiseled exterior with a gooey, sentimental core and a “********* Jar” intended to police his behavior through financial penalties. Winston accumulated so many eclectic pursuits and peccadilloes that The A.V. Club’s Myles McNutt began joking that the character—who becomes an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department in later seasons—is secretly a serial killer. Even Jess’ best friend, skeptical model Cece (Hannah Simone), revealed her vulnerabilities, ditching the runway to go back to school, paying for it by bartending alongside Nick.

The most exciting developments involved Nick, who over time became both a love interest for Jess and the soul of the series. New Girl is an ensemble show, but Nick Miller is its crowning achievement, a beautiful mess of a comic character played to stammering, yammering perfection by Jake Johnson. Meriwether is an avowed disciple of Cheers, and she didn’t just give Nick the same occupation as Sam Malone—she gave him some of Sam’s prickliness, too, which set the character up for a sizzling love/hate relationship with the persnickety interloper who breezes her way into his life in the shows’ pilot. Only Jess is more apt to sing her feelings than Diane Chambers ever was.

With its partially improvised looseness, single-camera format, and sexual frankness (you can definitely see why this show could’ve been called Chicks & Dicks), New Girl is an obvious product of its time, but it contains multiple strains of classic sitcom DNA. In further Cheers parallels, character interaction is frequently prioritized over plot, and a lot of that interaction occurs over drinks. Over the course of the series, Deschanel shows a knack for physical comedy in the Lucille Ball vein, with a wardrobe of disguises and costumes to match Lucy Ricardo’s. The characters rack up pseudonyms—Rebecca “Two Boobs” Johnson, Theodore K. Mullins, Julius Pepperwood—faster than anyone this side of the Seinfeld gang. And that’s all without taking into account the fact that only How I Met Your Mother has done more and gone for more seasons with the “friends on a couch” setup popularized by, er, Friends.

Chalk it up to the malleability of New Girl, which is more of an asset here than it would be for other sitcoms. A network-television show can have all sorts of unpredictable pitches thrown its way during the course of production—a regular cast member departs; a former cast member returns; the lead actor takes a leave and is temporarily replaced by a movie star, and then the show has to air an entire 22-episode season in the course of four months—but New Girl has managed to maintain a commendable batting average. All due credit to actors and writers who knew their characters, know them well, and can use them to anchor the show in the most trying of circumstances. “It’s a really nice experience to see how deep our group is,” Johnson told The A.V. Club during Deschanel-less run of episodes in 2016. “The voice of New Girl is stronger than any one character. There’s a tone to it, there’s a feeling of it. If somebody’s not in the episode, the show still goes on.”

The voice of the show is more than one character, and it has a wider range than “simply adorkable,” as evidenced by the 10 episodes below.

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I'll have to find the time to read this