Call It
In its first season, New Girl had a lot of strikes against it. Fox had coined the word "adorkable" for the show's marketing. This led almost immediately to a backlash against the show's star, Zooey Deschanel, who had accidentally taken on the job of representing modern femininity. Then, the show actually started, and Deschanel's Jess had the same clichéd problems that so many female sitcom protagonists have had before her: she's too nice! She's a total klutz! Oops, she's the worst thing about a show the title of which refers to her -- such that the guys of New Girl are all funnier and more compelling than the actual Girl! Over the course of that first season, Jess's character seemed to be a different person depending on who was writing her. One whole episode revolved around her inability to say the word "penis"; a few weeks later, she was raunchily telling everyone that she was on the hunt for "some strange." But by the end of that first season, when we see that Jess had kept Nick (Jake Johnson) from getting back together with his ex Caroline (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) by purposely hiding his keys and giving him a night in the desert to change his mind, producers had managed to smooth out some of Jess's wild character swings and turned her into a real person. As a result, Season 2 has been pretty great.
One of the very first things that happened was that Jess got laid off from her job as a middle-school teacher. As a consequence, she had a plausible reason to try new, out-of-character pursuits, like amping up her (conventional) sex appeal to be a shot girl at Nick's bar, and starting a sex-only relationship with Sam (the dreamy David Walton). But, as has been clear from the pilot, Jess's romantic trajectory was destined to intersect with Nick's -- and this is where the show could have gone horribly wrong.
Like Ross and Rachel before them, Jess and Nick seemed never to be into each other at the same time. And as they started to take tentative steps toward one another, their two other roommates, Schmidt (Max Greenfield) and Winston (Lamorne Morris) conspired to protect the balance of the four-way roommate relationship by keeping Nick and Jess apart. This turned out to be a good call from a storytelling perspective: Morris was a late addition to the show's cast (the fourth roommate in the series pilot was Coach, played by Damon Wayans Jr., but since New Girl was in second position for him and Happy Endings got picked up for a second season, Morris's Winston replaced him in the second episode), and it has often felt like producers weren't sure how to use him. The first-season handbell episode -- in which Winston helps Jess to coach several of her students who've formed a handbell choir in lieu of detention, and gets way too competitive about it -- might have been the one that finally made me remember his name, but the rest of the season was kind of a blank for Winston. Giving him a common mission with Schmidt -- inarguably the show's best character -- has helped bring Winston further into focus, as did the episodes revolving around Nick's dad (Dennis Farina), Winston's idol. They couldn't have done a storyline in Season 1 about everyone forgetting Winston's birthday because it would have felt too true; last week was the right time and also hilarious.
Schmidt has spent the season trying and generally failing to get over Cece (Hannah Simone), who dated one guy (Nelson Franklin's schlubby, generally unimpressive Robby) to get over Schmidt, and then got engaged to another (Shivrang, played by Satya Babha) out of self-imposed pressure to have a baby -- preferably an Indian one -- while she still can. The definitive loss of Cece spurred Schmidt to confront his douchey ways at last, leading to his lovely if predictably short-lived reunion with Elizabeth (Merritt Wever), who knew and loved him before his douchiness had calcified into the character we met at the start of the series. Schmidt represents the biggest challenge to producers, I imagine, because he has to be believably likable while also displaying attributes that, if we knew him in reality, would make him a complete nightmare. Amazingly, they -- and Greenfield -- pull it off. (Any time I think of Schmidt pronouncing the name of the powdered white drug you snort "c'caine," it's as funny as the first time.)
But what's the most amazing is that the writers got Jess and Nick together, given that Jess is as close as a human can get to a magical woodland sprite and Nick is the world's youngest grumpy old man. But the loss of her job gave Jess a little more edge, and various events -- the wish to impress a new boss, the loss of his father, an encounter with a hobo who claims to be Nick's future self -- have made Nick want to be less of a fuckup. The episode "Quick Hardening Caulk," more than any other, showed why Jess and Nick were actually meant to be, as a needed home repair let Nick demonstrate his (very macho) competence in this area, and Jess to experience a consequent physical reaction in her area. ...Sorry. But it did!
And last night, inevitably, Nick had a crisis of confidence in the wake of Jess's dad (Rob Reiner) expressing his disapproval of Nick in the season's penultimate episode. Challenging Jess, Nick got her to admit that she does sometimes think that their relationship is a bad idea, and forced her to break up with him. But of course, that didn't stick: surely everyone has doubts that their relationships with anyone are bad ideas, but they stick with them anyway, because how else are you going to find out if you're wrong? Frankly, if you still like each other after falling through a ventilation duct, thus loosing a badger onto a ballroom full of wedding guests, you can probably survive anything.
Ross and Rachel ended their first season as a couple by partially ruining a wedding, too, and broke up halfway through the season that followed, so it's possible that contrivance will pull Nick and Jess apart if producers run out of stories for a happy couple to star in. But for now, we got to see them off into hiatus knowing they're probably going to give it a shot for a little while longer. I'll take it.