Laundry Technology Makes New Girl's Snob And Slob Switch Places

When Jess and Coach both vacate the loft for a teachers' conference, it's obvious that the remaining dudes will wild out with a Boys' Night (and even more obvious that a sulky Coach will bitch about missing it for such a lame reason). At least, that's the plan. Said plan is quickly scuttled when the first thing they think of to do that they can't when Jess is there is to stand at her bedroom window ogling the women in the yoga class across the street, and Schmidt makes an overly emphatic gesture that splashes his sangria all over Jess's quilt. Schmidt, trying to cover his panic, announces that he'll "have it cleaned," but Nick offers another solution: "Why don't you just wash it?" But, of course, he knows the answer.

Schmidt doesn't know how to do laundry. Schmidt! Doesn't know how to do laundry!

Apparently, after this idea was pitched in the writers' room, someone pointed out that this would be difficult for us to believe, since Schmidt is the biggest fancypants in the loft -- fancier even than Jess, maybe. So they've given Schmidt a whole backstory for why he never learned: when he went to college, he was excited to learn how and become more self-sufficient. But when he went to the dorm laundry room and pulled out his maternity cords to put in the washer, a bunch of cute girls saw and laughed at him, and he fled in shame. (That "Fat Schmidt" is still being used as a punchline is a complaint for another day.) Not to worry, though: Nick is going to be Schmidt's laundry tutor.

So...okay. Here are the things the show wants us to buy in order for this episode to work.

Nick sat on this laundry thing for 10+ years: As the flashback reminds us, Nick and Schmidt were roommates in college, so at some point, Nick noticed that Schmidt just never did laundry -- apparently without knowing why -- and waited until they'd been living together for over a decade to bring it up.

Schmidt's method of getting clean clothes has never been discussed: I imagine it's more common in New York than in Los Angeles, where more rental apartments are equipped with washers and dryers, but there is such a thing as fluff and fold. Lots of people choose to pay someone to do their laundry -- even if they know how to do laundry, as most adults do -- for the convenience. That said, since it's Schmidt, it's just as easy to imagine him just buying t-shirts, socks, and underwear to wear once and throw in the garbage and dry-cleaning everything else; this is not a character who always makes the most fiscally responsible choices. A few lines of dialogue could have clarified which of these Schmidt's been doing since he moved out of his parents' house.

Nick knows better how to keep fabrics clean than Schmidt: I have to take us all the way back to Season 1 and remind you of the scene in which Nick laughed off the idea that anyone would ever launder a towel: "I don't wash the towel, the towel washes me!!!" (So when Schmidt asked Nick whether he'd ever washed the towel, it was probably to point out that Schmidt normally did it, but how did that happen if Schmidt didn't know how?!) Yet now Nick is conversant enough with the laundry sciences to teach them to Schmidt? It would have made more sense if Nick had volunteered to teach Schmidt how to do his laundry and been only slightly less ignorant than Schmidt!

New Girl has long been guilty of suddenly adding random attributes to its characters, or should I say "character," because generally those have been assigned to Winston (who, this week, adds "doesn't know how to use rulers" to his quirkfolio). But this week, both Schmidt's and Nick's are not just random: they are specifically discontinuous. Is it cute to see Schmidt try to guess which parts of the laundry machines go where and what their functions are? Sure. But I still feel like a guy who goes as hard after women as Schmidt does would for sure know how to make sure his gotch are free of unsightly stains and odours, and that if he somehow wasn't, he wouldn't necessarily trust to take a remedial lesson from his local hobo.