New Girl S1E4 “Naked”
Fox did something really stupid when they pulled New Girl, one of their biggest new hits, from the lineup for almost a month. Yeah, I know baseball sometimes would have interfered, and jumping around timeslots wouldn’t have helped. But, as baseball analysts say - you have to play the hot hand.
It’s a good thing the previous installment, “Wedding,” was a huge step in the right direction and left a good taste in everyone’s mouth. Jess was believable without losing her charm, and everyone else played off each other to make a pretty good arc for Nick. Laughs have never been a problem on New Girl, at least for me - every episode has made me laugh more than any other new sitcom this year combined.
The show’s triumphant return to regular scheduling, “Naked,” had a lot of problems the previous two episodes did. Jess was cute, not saying the word “penis,” but she also wasn’t believable, specifically when she didn’t knock when entering Nick’s room. Her lapse in judgment in the cold open (which I couldn’t hear, thanks to Comcast, but could make out well enough) was also frown-worthy. These moments make Jess less and less of a character. For example, what did we learn tonight? She’s shy about sex? Contrast that with “Wedding,” where a lot about her personality and crisis management regarding friends did come to light. Nick also shined in that ep, and here we just learned he’s still not moving on from his ex, something we already basically knew.
Meanwhile, Winston has a weird c-plot - he lived the last two years in Latvia, so he doesn’t know anything about pop culture the last two years. This culminates in a funny gag where he’s watching The King’s Speech and The Human Centipede simultaneously, but it’s really early in the episode and never picked back up. I was waiting for a bunch of other jokes like that, but it was totally forgotten until the last act where he tried (unsuccessfully) to tie it in to Schmidt’s problems. Those problems, while absolutely in-character and generally funny, also needed some more to make it really work. It feels like there are two or three deleted scenes that would’ve really tied the back end of this episode together, but they got cut due to running time or something.
It may sound like I didn’t like this episode - I shouldn’t have. Like I listed above, it was a step down from the last episode, Jess reverted back into dumb child mode, and there was a dangling subplot. My TV critic senses were tingling, telling me to write a scathing review. But a funny thing happened. I really liked the episode.
Maybe it’s just because the show was off the air for a week. Maybe I can relate to the characters due to my position in life. Maybe I liked it because of how plots have paralleled my own life. But I keep laughing and having fun with these characters, week after week. I enjoy spending time with them, even if I don’t know any woman who would ever act like that. (There were two female comic exaggerations this week.) I like the better episodes a whole lot more, of course, but my time spent is always worth it. I really don’t know how to analyze this - I just had fun and laughed a lot. That’s what’s ultimately important with any comedy episode, but we just focus on a bunch of other stuff so there’s actually something to write about.
Given that the ratings are quite good, especially in the demo, New Girl will most likely get past the 24 episodes that are already ordered. Considering that an episode can fail this much on a criticism scale and still work for me overall, despite my best objections, that’s terribly encouraging. I’ve talked a lot about how hard it is to make a successful TV sitcom work, especially in the early going. If New Girl continues down this path, Fox will have a solid comedy. But if they can make more episodes like “Wedding” and sprinkle lesser ones like this in, we’ve got a new great sitcom on our hands.
