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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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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