New Girl Lets Us Spy On Winston And Bertie's Delicate Dance Of Seduction

"I found him under the steps eating a dead raccoon's eyeball," she said. "Your cat's a psycho."

At first, he didn't take in the exquisite creature before him, focused as he was on having successfully recovered his best friend: his cat, Ferguson. But as the conversation turned to the comfort people can derive from their furry companions, it soon became clear that he and she might just be soulmates.

"I'd rather stay home and watch Grey's with him," she said, of her hamster, Hotchkiss, "than go out to some bar, try to impress some douchebag dressed as a lumberjack. I am done chasing men."

"I hear that," he replied. "I am so done chasing women."

She cocked a brow and smiled. "That's too bad."

His eyes widened. She winked. "Winston, do you like bologna? It's the kind you have to peel the wrapper off just to get to the meat."

"And do you have pudding in a cup?" he inquired.

"I never have pudding in a cup."

He grinned.

"...Is that a good thing or a bad thing that she doesn't?" asked his buddy, who somehow hadn't left yet.

"That's a good thing," he said. And he meant it.

When Jessica Chaffin's Bertie first appeared in the latest New Girl, I will confess to some apprehension about where it might go. On most sitcoms, guest stars who fall outside TV's generally very narrow bounds of conventional attractiveness are usually the butt of their plotlines' jokes (not to say that Chaffin isn't lovely — she is — but the show's two full-time female cast members are both actual models). I was even more disheartened as that first scene went on and her weirdness started to present itself: I mean, this is a woman whose unusual interests and habits are so outré that even Nick — NICK — is put off by them. You know a lady's kind of an oddball when she's judged as such by a guy who doesn't believe towels ever need to be washed.

The more we get to know Bertie, the stranger she gets. She cheerfully discloses the facts of her "dark years" and tubal ligation to a couple of dudes she just met. But while a lesser show would lard on the quirks just make her seem like an alarming outsider, untouchable to the show's regular characters, New Girl is smarter, and does something less predictable with Bertie: it shows her totally seducing Winston over by being so real. It's clear that she doesn't need to go out to bars to chase men: she can just make do with the ones who show up on her doorstep after she finds their cats eating wild animals' eyes. Before long, she's teasingly excused herself to take her stomach medicine so that Nick can take his leave...and so that nature can take its course.

She had just finished taking a dose of her stomach medicine when she closed the medicine cabinet and saw him standing there, waiting for her.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," he replied. "Can I get some of that?"

She handed him the bottle and he took a long pull.

"You spending the night or what?" she asked, with more than a little swagger.

"Oh hell yeah," he shot back immediately.

And, just like that, it was on.