Following an underwhelming third season, the Fox comedy has creatively rebounded in Season 4 by telling simpler, funnier stories. New Girl ’s executive producers explain to BuzzFeed News how they regained control over their show.
Ray Mickshaw / FOX
No one would dispute that New Girl lost its way in Season 3 — not even the show's executive producers. "We obviously struggled last year," creator Elizabeth Meriwether told BuzzFeed News, sitting on the couch in her simply decorated, desk-free office on the Fox lot in Los Angeles with her fellow executive producers. "I think one of the show's strengths is that it's always been able to go to a million different places and do a million different things, but the problem with that is sometimes when we take a big swing and miss, you really feel the pain of that."
The big swing Meriwether spoke of was putting its romantic leads, Jess Day (Zooey Deschanel) and Nick Miller (Jake Johnson), into a full-blown relationship. The show was initially built around Jess, Nick, Schmidt (Max Greenfield), and Winston (Lamorne Morris), a foursome brought together by fate — and Craigslist — but the chemistry between Nick and Jess quickly became too palpable for anyone to ignore. Initially a huge hit with fans, the storyline quickly presented problems for the writers and triggered a domino effect of events that led to the show's eventual floundering.
"By moving into the Nick-Jess relationship, we changed the engine of the show to this relationship inside of the group," said co-executive producer Brett Baer. "The trick with last year was you get these two likable, audience favorite characters in a relationship and to make it interesting there has to be conflict, but what kind of conflict can you have without making one of the two parties look like a villain? You have to walk a careful line, but then that's not great for comedy."
Johnson and Deschanel in a September 2013 episode.
Ray Mickshaw / FOX
A second, unanticipated problem cropped up as a result of the Nick-Jess pairing. "We did an episode in Season 2 called 'Parking Spot' which was really successful for us, and at the core of that was Schmidt feeling this triangulation with Nick and Jess," said Baer. "So when we got into the Nick-Jess relationship we tried to capitalize on that dynamic, and that turned out not to be a great color for us because it created too much fracture within the group."
The fallout from that splintering led Schmidt to move out of the group's loft and into a very polarizing storyline that saw him date two women — Cece (Hannah Simone) and Elizabeth (Merritt Wever) — at the same time.
"We thought it would be interesting to have a guy who was legitimately in love with two women," said executive producer Dave Finkel. "We didn't think of it as cheating, but, when you look at it from a bird's eye view, it is. I think we learned a lot about what the show is to the audience through that."
"The reaction to the Schmidt thing totally took me by surprise," Baer added. "That was a learning experience for all of us about what the show is to the audience. The audience wanted something from the show that didn't take them to this darker place that dealt with unseemly things. The show wants to be a wish fulfillment thing about a group of friends who band together and the fracture between them wasn't helping."
Typically, television writers have time to course-correct their respective shows, thanks to the nature of production and a weekly broadcast model, but a pair of time-consuming logistical developments made that impossible. First, Fox awarded New Girl with 2014's coveted post-Super Bowl episode and tapped Prince to guest star in the installment. "It took three and a half months to put that episode together," Finkel said. "It was like running an entire show within another show because it took so much energy."
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