Jenn's Pick: The Top 20 Episodes of 'New Girl'

I knew from the moment I watched the pilot that I was going to enjoy New Girl.

But honestly, I didn't fall completely in love with the show until "Wedding," which was a few episodes later. Though the story of a quirky, awkward and newly-single woman living with a bunch of guys she found on a Craigslist ad sounded like something that had the potential to be hilarious, the tone of the show subtly shifted after a few episodes — for the better. When New Girl began, it was a show that fixated a lot on Jess' eccentricities. And though that made for a nice joke, it wasn't going to sustain the series long-term. What the show did was rather brilliant: over the years, the FOX comedy has drawn away from focusing only on Jess and what makes her funny and weird, to focusing on all of the roommates in the loft. New Girl has become a true ensemble comedy, and it's this choice that has made it such a hit. It's also what has made it more well-rounded and inclusive. A show only about a weird girl was beginning to (after even a few episodes) feel way too cartoonish and flat.

The show became better when it embraced Nick's quirks and Schmidt's oddities and Winston's weirdness and Cece's sarcasm. Over the past five years, this show has brilliantly tackled everyday subjects and made them both funny and endearing. This is a show about how being an adult doesn't mean you have all of your crap together. And that's something that is sorely lacking in television these days, where it seems like 20-somethings have apartments that are way too nice and jobs that are way too good and wardrobes that are supposed to look casual and young, but would — in reality — cost thousands of dollars.

(And, okay, the loft in New Girl is totally an unrealistic living situation for Los Angeles, but the fact that four people have to share it in order to make rent is something the show at least acknowledges.)

It's a show about adult friendship and what it means to love, lose, and occasionally just be downright confused about who you are and what you should do with your life.

New Girl celebrates its 100th episode on Tuesday (can you believe we have had 100 episodes of this show already?!) and in honor if it reaching this milestone, I've decided to rank my top 20 episodes of the show in order. This list was super hard to make and I had to cut a lot of episodes out that I really love (holla "First Date," "Tinfinity," "Fluffer," "Oregon," "Mars Landing," and more).

So what episodes DID make my cut? Check out the list below!

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The Rise of Female-Led Sitcoms: A Dialogue Between Jenn and Jaime

Jaime Poland and I have been friends for a long time. Because we've been friends for a long time, we often have in-depth conversations about our favorite television shows. Jaime was a Creative Writing major in college with a minor in film so I think that her opinion is always valid whenever criticisms or discussions of pop culture are on the table. She's smart and she has a lot of great opinions. And she's also one of my favorite people in the entire world. So when I asked if she would sit down with me via Google Hangout (which took both of us -- grown, adult women with college degrees -- an absurd amount of time to figure out) and discuss the rise of female-led sitcoms and female-led television series in the past few years, she was more than happy to oblige. (As if she had a choice in the matter, let's be honest.)

So below, we discuss some of the most recent television developments in terms of feminism and comedy. We talk about why, exactly, the female-led sitcom is on the rise and what makes these series so appealing and intriguing to the masses. We also discuss what can be gleaned from a female-led series that is missing from a male-driven show. Enjoy!

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Jenn's Pick: My Top 20 Nick/Jess Moments

When I first started watching New Girl, I immediately fell in love with the idea of Nick and Jess becoming a romantic couple. I never ship couples from the pilot episodes, but I did with these two. I can’t put my finger on it and I suspect that the writers couldn’t quite either, but there was something inherently interesting about the way that Jake Johnson and Zooey Deschanel played off one another in their scenes that made me believe that they had potential.

It’s often hard to find great chemistry between characters on a television series, but this is something that Jake and Zooey have never lacked. They’ve always seemingly had a natural rapport and easiness as Nick and Jess, which made the two characters so appealing. Seemingly, Nick and Jess are polar opposites. When we meet both of them in the pilot, we are introduced to a gruff, curmudgeonly bartender in the character of Nick and a quirky, idealistic young woman in Jess. But as the audience grew to know and understand these characters over the course of a few seasons, we learned that they were more similar than immediately presumed. Both had suffered through the loss of a love, and it shaped the way that they viewed the world around them (for better or worse). Both had goals for themselves; both cared a lot about the people around them and had high expectations for the way that they should be treated in return.

Eventually, Nick and Jess grew from these goofy, weird, unexpected friends to romantic interests and – most recently – exes. The road has been paved with some amazing and delightful moments in both their friendship and romantic relationship and while we anxiously await the return of New Girl next fall, I thought I would ease our hiatus woes with a countdown of my top 20 Nick/Jess moments of all time. (I could have easily added more than 20, but I refrained.) So, if you’re ready, let’s take a look at some of MY favorite moments between these characters. Some are significant and others are so simple that you may have blinked and missed them during an episode. Feel free to add your own or rank your own favorite moments in the comments section.

Grab an Old Fashioned and settle in because we’re about to count down my favorite Nick and Jess moments of all time!

* GIF credit goes to everyone but me, since I'm not talented at things.

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Report Cards Are In! (Grading This Season of My Favorite Shows)

I never worried about report card days in school. I knew, usually without fail, that I would see all A’s and B’s. I had never even gotten a C on a progress report or a report card until college (darn you, Microeconomics course!). I was always an overachiever and a perfectionist and, to be honest, I am still the exact same way today. Since kids all across the country are wrapping up their classes and getting ready for summer, receiving their report cards and taking their finals, I thought it only appropriate that I would present my TV report card for this season!

So below the cut, get ready to get graded: I scored the most recent seasons of some of my television shows, noted the best episodes of their season, and explained why these shows got the grades that they did. Cross your fingers and close your eyes, then open them and see this year’s TV report card.

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Will-They-Won't-They: A Study in the Success & Dangers Of This Trope

My darling friend Julieta tweeted something recently that really made me think. She wrote: “I don’t understand why TV writers in general are so scared of having their characters fall in love and then be in long-term, committed relationships.” Rather than, as Julieta noted, have characters fall in love and be in committed relationships, most comedies fall into the largest pothole in the world (reminiscent of this one): the hole of the “will-they-won’t-they” relationship.

Now, these relationships have both merits and drawbacks. A good television series won’t drag out the “will-they-won’t-they” for seasons upon seasons without any seeming conclusion, be it good or bad. A good television series will recognize the fact that this relationship is a tool and a powerful one at that: it provides the show with an added layer of tension that lures audience members in and promises them romance and intrigue. A good television show will use this relationship to its advantage by having it GO somewhere. A good television show will realize that there is a precise and delicately balanced window of time in which their characters need to act on their romantic tension, lest the audience feel deceived at best and downright infuriated at worst at a lack of development. A good television show cannot draw out a “will-they-won’t-they” forever, because if they do, they won’t be a good television show anymore.

Relationships are the hinge on which all of humanity swings, so it makes sense that it is the hinge on which television sitcoms seem to swing as well. There are friendships and families and romantic relationships on television just as there are in real life. The problem, however, is that television writers often find it so difficult to mimic real-life relationships. Why is this? Because writers are afraid that their audiences are restless and fickle and if they commit to one thing for too long – one character or one romantic pairing or one plot – that their fans will lose interest. “Will-they-won’t-they” relationships are the obvious (quick) remedy to this fear of audience boredom and subsequent abandonment if, and only if, they are executed correctly.

What I thought I might do is take a look at some of the “will-they-won’t-they” relationships that have piqued my interest over the years and discuss the merits and drawbacks of each as they affect the television comedy series as a whole.

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It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World (But It Would Be Nothing Without A Woman)

I feel like the majority of the stories that I post here begin with "I was talking to my friend Kim." But I was talking to my friend Kim recently about Community and some qualms we have been having with the writing. I told her that what the show truly needs is to return to a balanced writing staff a la season one with an equal number of both males and females. That led me down an interesting rabbit hole in attempting to discover exactly HOW many episodes per season of Community were written or co-written by female writers. After I made a rather startling discovery, I decided to apply this investigative work to more of my favorite network television comedies and made some more pretty starling discoveries, as well as developed a hypothesis based on my raw data. (Look at me sounding all science-y and stuff! You'd hardly know this was a writing blog.)

So, before I break down each show and its seasons, let me explain what you'll be reading and how I recovered the data/what it means:

The shows: I studied Community, New Girl, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and (to a lesser extent) The Mindy Project.

How I came up with the data: I researched the episodes in each season that have aired. (*Now updated since the seasons are over, to reflect the final percentages!) If a single episode was written solely by a woman or by a pair of women, I counted it as 1 point. My reasoning, of course, is that I am mostly focusing on the number of episodes penned by women. It doesn't matter if one or two or a hundred women write an episode: it counts as one episode. If a single episode was written by a writing team consisting of a male and female, I counted it as 1/2 of a point. I gave women like Annie Mebane and Amy Poehler credit if they wrote with a partner because, duh, they still wrote something!

What it all means: This data is obviously a baseline, not an end-all-be-all set of numbers. A variety of factors played into the percentages -- the number of episodes per season is, of course, a major factor. The larger number of episodes in a season, the less likely that there is a large percentage of episodes written by females (as sad as that is to type). Additionally, the size of the writing staff and the diversity among the staff plays a factor in the number of episodes written by women. Shows with a high turnover rate among the writing staff will also factor into this number. Again: it's not a conclusive set of data, but it's definitely interesting to watch the trend among certain shows rise and fall.

And now, without further adieu, let's take a look at some of the shows on my list!

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Throwing Awards at Their Faces (Three Actors Who Deserve All the Nominations)

In a world of DVR, Hulu, and – in my case – television streaming, very few people concern themselves with watching television shows live these days. Families have commitments; children have sports practices or theatre rehearsal. College students are cramming for mid-terms or else procrastinating from cramming for mid-terms. And even nine-to-fivers cannot schedule their nights around television programming. We have busy lives and busy schedules, and sometimes (unfortunately) our favorite television shows suffer at the hands of the merciless but elusive Nielsen unicorns because we don’t watch “live.”

There are only three scripted shows that I make the effort to watch live each week: Community, New Girl, and Doctor Who. I’ll forgo watching How I Met Your Mother and then marathon in chunks. I used to skip weeks of The Office and be perfectly content. But the three shows I listed above, I will always make the effort to watch live. I’ll schedule my life around them (which… sounds pretty sad when I type it out like that, actually).

As all three have recently wrapped up their seasons, I thought it would be appropriate to talk a bit about actors within the shows that I feel deserve a lot more recognition and praise than they usually receive. I’m talking, of course, about actors Joel McHale, Jake Johnson, and Matt Smith. And I will be talking about them a LOT in this post – actually, I’m devoting the entire post to them – and how they each deserve to have all the awards thrown at their faces.

Well, not literally at their faces.

… You all know what I mean.

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Jenn's Pick: Top 5 Episodes of Season Two's "New Girl"

A lot of television series struggle to find their footing during their second seasons. The term “sophomore slump” is tossed around quite frequently, and I think that the reason is due to this: it is very easy to launch yourself – your characters, your stories, your sets – head-first into an adventure. That’s what first seasons truly are, if we’re being honest. They’re adventures, they’re explorations, and they’re meant to be that way. We, as audience members, need to be invested within a few episodes of a series, or else we will move on and find something else that will capture our interest. (Chalk it up to our short attention spans.)

So what tends to happen, in my experience as a television viewer, is that series try so hard to pull out all their stops during their first season: they want to make us invested in these characters and their lives so they throw hijinks and shenanigans and drama at the viewers. But many shows nosedive during their second seasons because they simply try too hard and have no idea how to progress, naturally, from the place where they ended their first season. The series becomes more and more about pleasing the audience rather than investing in characters (i.e. why Glee became so erratic as a show, and why the first few episodes of the second season of Community were shaky, in my opinion). The very viewers that the show tried so hard to please during the first season bolt at the uneven writing and/or acting in the second season.

“See Ya” is one of my favorite episodes of New Girl’s freshman year, and it is also the series’ first finale episode. The reason that I loved this episode so much was partially due to the amazing writing and acting, but truly rooted in the not-so-finale vibe that it provided. It ended happily – Nick returned to the loft and the characters had dance parties alone in their respective rooms. It didn’t feel like an ending, really, but a beginning.

I don’t mean to presume that series shouldn’t end on cliffhangers – the first season of Community did, and it was one of those moments where you suck in a breath and don’t exhale until the credits begin to roll. It was THAT good. But what I admired about the first season of New Girl and what I also admire about its second season is that the show doesn’t slam on the brakes at the end of a season and then rev the engine during the premiere of the following season. The transitions are smooth – “See Ya” and “Elaine’s Big Day” both had endings that felt rather organic. But perhaps that’s because they weren’t actually endings at all, but beginnings. These characters have new chances, new choices, and new adventures each day. I think that sometimes television series forget that.

Nevertheless, New Girl technically has ended until September (unless you join in on our #SummerRewatch this summer!), which means that it is time for me to reflect on five of my absolute favorite episodes this season (okay, six, because I am a cop-out). Its sophomore year has been so consistent, hilarious, and heartfelt that it doesn’t resemble anything close to that “sophomore slump” other shows encounter. I feel that this series has managed to avoid that pitfall by focusing more on developing their characters than catering to the audience whims. And that? Well, that combined with the talented writing, brilliant producing, and exceptional acting made this season of New Girl one of the best.

Ready to see which episodes ranked as my favorites? Grab some popcorn and put on your yellow tracksuit, because here are my top five episodes of this season!

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Explorations of Romantic Chemistry (A Nick/Jess vs. Jeff/Annie Post)

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line, I really fell in love with New Girl. Before the show even aired, I had a feeling that I’d be attached to the quirky comedy. I was, after all, a fan of Zooey Deschanel. And then the pilot aired, and I was pleased and I went through the entire first season falling pretty hard for the little sitcom and for its characters and also – a lot – for the Nick/Jess angle of the series. To be truthful, Nick Miller and Jessica Day are the only couple on television recently that I have “shipped” from the pilot. I don’t know exactly what it was, and neither do the creators, but something seemed to click at the bar when Nick and Jess were talking to one another. There was some sort of chemistry between Jake Johnson and Zooey Deschanel, but the writers and producers – as they admitted recently at Paleyfest – were adamently against putting the two together, romantically. Deschanel insisted: “I mean, really really hard you guys [the producers] fought against the chemistry.” Both Johnson and Deschanel then cracked jokes about how they were forbidden to touch or even look at one another during scenes because of their chemistry.

If you flash forward a season, you’ll realize that the same writers and producers who were so hesitant to even place Nick and Jess in the same scene together are running full-speed ahead with the couple. So what changed? What fundamentally changed the mind of these creators, to the point where they are now more than willing to explore the chemistry and tension between these two characters? I don’t think that anything monumental has changed, really. But there was something very noteworthy that Liz Meriwether recently said at Paleyfest when asked why she chose to put Nick and Jess together now – why she chose to have the couple kiss in “Cooler” rather than drag the wait out until the season finale or (perhaps) even LATER.

“If we’d waited any longer,” Meriwether said, “it was going to start to feel, like, not true - like not what would really happen. I feel like they would have attacked each other a year ago, probably.”

So what Nick and Jess boil down to – what ALL couples who have unresolved tension or chemistry boil down to – is the element of timing. Meriwether and her team admit to not exactly writing their characters or show the “right” way. They admit to flying by the seat of their pants for a lot of things. They don’t KNOW where their couples or characters might end up. They’re certain of a few things, but don’t let those few things necessarily dictate the episodes they write now. They kind of let the relationships and characters and stories form organically, rather than forcing them into a preconceived box of ideas and plans. They fought hard against Nick and Jess for a while before realizing that… well, that isn’t how thse characters would behave. Something had to give, and that something was the idea that the writers could control or contain characters and actors that had intense chemistry.

That’s when Meriwether and her team just let them be and watched what happened.

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Character Appreciation Post: Winston Bishop ("New Girl")

In every show, there are some characters that are more underappreciated than others. New Girl is usually not one of those shows, mainly because of how cohesive the ensemble is and how often different sets of characters have the opportunity to share screen time with one another. But the truth is that amidst the Nick/Jess and Schmidt/CeCe and all the other crazy shenanigans, sometimes we forget about Winston Bishop. It’s not that we love him any less than we love the rest of the group – at least, that’s not how I feel. New Girl, quite frankly, is the one show where I have equal love for each character in the loft (and CeCe) and can honestly say that I don’t have a least favorite character. 

But today’s post is celebrating the wonderful, weird, amazing Winston Bishop. I was a bit disheartened, after viewing the pilot, that Damon Wayans Jr. would not be staying on the series due to his commitment to Happy Endings. But when Lamorne Morris (@LamorneMorris) joined as Winston, Nick’s old friend who had been in Latvia playing basketball for the past few years… well, I fell in love with him instantly. And truly, at the end of “Kryptonite,” I KNEW he was a special character because of how he put on a woman’s hat and stepped up to defend Jess, a woman he barely knew. And Winston just got better from that point.

My collaboration buddy, partner-in-crime, and basically soul mate Jaime and I decided that we wanted to do something together and I suggested character appreciation posts! There are so many wonderful characters on television that we don’t get a chance to celebrate as often as we should (nor do we get a chance to really celebrate the actors and actresses who portray them), so we thought this would be a great way to put our heads together and come up with some of our favorite moments that showcase some of the best characters on television. These aren’t necessarily all characters who are underappreciated, though. I think the whole point of the character appreciation series is just going to be to APPRECIATE various characters on shows who deserve our appreciation. Sounds like a plan, no?

Then let’s look at the vast array of Winston Bishop moments that both Jaime and I love, shall we?

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Jenn's Pick: Top 10 Television Pilots

Television pilots are tricky things. And by that, what I really mean is that hardly anyone (at least anyone who I have met) will say that their favorite episode of any television series is the pilot. It takes a good, long while for some shows to establish the tone of their show and to develop their characters. For some shows, this may take a few episodes. For others, it will take seasons. But pilots are integral and necessary to a show – I’ve always held fast to the belief that, to measure the progression of a show, you should watch its pilot and the most current episode to date. It is then that you can determine whether the show has progressed or regressed in terms of plot, consistency, character development, etc. Take, for example, the pilot episode of something like Doctor Who. The 2005 pilot, “Rose,” introduced us to a shop girl from London and a 900-year old, time-traveling alien. The ninth incarnation of the Doctor was dark and pretty self-hating. Rose Tyler was young, optimistic, and someone we (or at least I) assumed would always be the damsel-in-distress. As you might know, if you watch the show, Doctor Who has progressed so much in terms of developing characters, plot, and yes, even special effects. (They have come a LONG way since 2005, let me tell you!)

So, I’ve decided to list ten pilot episodes of shows that have passed every test in my book and landed in the “solid pilot” pile. But what you’re about to discover is something pretty interesting: I don’t like some of these shows anymore.

“But Jenn,” you might say, “I thought you said that these shows passed your test!”

While these series may have developed pilots that passed with flying colors, some of them are shows that I merely fell out of love with, and some – shockingly! – I even detest now. Pilots are episodes that are important, as I said earlier, but are not always indicative of a show’s consistency to be spectacular. Also, it’s interesting to note that the exact opposite is true.

(Spoiler alert: you will not see Community or Doctor Who listed. Though these are two of my favorite shows to date, their pilots weren’t enrapturing enough to make my list. I didn’t fall in love with Community until five episodes later, and Doctor Who took me until “World War Three” to really connect with.)

So just because a show is absent from this list or, conversely, because it’s on it, don’t assume that this is indicative of my present feelings toward the series.

With that, are you ready to see which pilots made it onto my list? (Don’t worry, guys. I still have a LOT of great pilots that have been suggested – LOST, Alias, Friday Night Lights – that will not be on here, merely because I have not seen the series yet.) Well, then, let’s head back to the very beginning!

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Top 5 "New Girl" Episodes (According to... Well, This Chick!)

I keep meaning to do a review of New Girl (be it a random episode, a marathon from the very beginning, or the start of season two), but I have yet to get around to it. In lieu of that, I decided to do a "top five" post, highlighting my favorite episodes of the quirky comedy. The idea was, in part, courtesy of Kim (of "Head Over Feels"), as we spent yesterday narrowing down our top five favorite episodes of Community.

So, are you ready to see what I chose as the best of the best for Zooey Deschanel's FOX comedy series? Well, venture to the loft, take a seat, but make sure you're using the correct bath towel. Here we go! :)

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