Prince's New Girl Role Makes Him Instant Sitcom Royalty

When a series lands the time slot after the Super Bowl, there's a significant amount of pressure to do something special. Alias blew up its whole series premise with a hard reset that literally changed everything. Grey's Anatomy put unexploded ammunition inside a patient. New Girl isn't quite in a position to do anything that nutsoid, so it went the way a lot of post-Super Bowl sitcoms do: stuntcasting!

Sitcom stuntcasting can be risky in a post-Chris Martin on Extras world, so you, like me, might have been nervous when the news hit that Prince would appear in New Girl's Super Bowl special. Prince? Interacting with Nick and Jess? It's mental! The fact that the episode falls in the middle of a season of somewhat inconsistent quality may have alarmed you even more, as it did me. But — and I don't want to overstate matters — Prince may represent a new high-water mark for celebrity sitcom cameos.

Admittedly, it doesn't start out so promising. What happens is, Jess and Cece are nearly run over by an SUV driven by someone who is so apologetic for her recklessness that she invites them to a party at her boss's house. Her boss is Prince. Obviously, they go, and obviously, they do not try to push their luck by inviting any of Jess's current or former roommates, and obviously, the moment before the limo Prince has sent to retrieve Jess and Cece pulls away, Nick tells Jess he loves her — no big deal, except that it's the first time either of them has said it. This kicks off the wackier (I mean relatively) part of the plot where the guys have to weasel their way into the party without invitations so that Nick can repair the damage, which they do...and Nick and Jess have barely gotten into it when there's a welcome interruption.

Prince decides to nominate himself as Jess's romantic coach (and honestly, considering the idiots who surround her most days, she could do worse). What makes this so great is multifold. Lesser shows bring in celebrities to play themselves so that they can give the episode the benefit of their stardom while standing apart from the action and acting superior to it; someone like Jean-Claude Van Damme in the Season 2 Friends episode that aired after the Super Bowl is a prime example. But New Girl takes advantage of the fact that Prince really is a fan of the show to integrate him into the action in a way that plays on what we know about him for real, but also lets him be funny. I mean, is it likely that Prince takes a personal interest in the love lives of random giant-eyed girls who happen to show up at his house parties? Not really. But can we believe it's possible that he might meet one and decide, for fun, to be her fairy godfather? I kind of can! And even if I couldn't, there will literally never come a day when I'll get mad at any pretext for a makeover montage.

I realize that they couldn't very well get Prince for an episode and not have him sing, and of course, having helped her fix her relationship, he has to call Jess up on stage to perform with him. Given that the episode had already established that Nick and Winston were huge Prince fans in high school, this payoff is winning and sweet despite being inevitable. But it would have been even better if the show's producers had been daring enough not to do the obvious thing. When a Janet Jackson guests on a Will & Grace, of course you have to make her dance, because she can't act. But Prince is actually good! I mean, he shoulders more of the plot in this episode than Damon Wayans Jr. did, and makes it look completely effortless. Ending with a song feels like the redemptive moment that justified his appearance in the show, and as such is totally unnecessary: his extremely assured, likable performance stands on its own.

But I can't really get too mad at a song, either — not when I was so charmed by the scene where he acted opposite a CG butterfly.

Those two deserve a spinoff.