New Girl creator Liz Meriwether gets that pain is deeply, deeply funny that there is nothing more comedic than trying to love and be loved by other people, and nothing more meaningful than trying to do it alongside your friends. The characters, as eccentric as they are, are complex they traverse miles of emotional and psychic space in places you would least expect, without ever even brushing up against “dramedy”. Nick Miller raw-dogs life with the kind of instinct and heart that we can only hope to have in a world that’s increasingly reliant on image - and a result, he’s sexy as all hell. He crumples under the slightest pressure, keeps his money in a Ziploc bag, and has a self-described “Coney Island fat-strong” body, but is redeemed by the way he loves the people around him. Nothing exemplifies this more than the internet’s collective thirst for Nick Miller, the grumpy, bitter bartender who is Jess’s roommate and love interest throughout the show. New Girl understood its audience it was meta it exuded a pained awkwardness and self-knowledge that people growing up in the digital age could relate to. Remarkably, the men of New Girl brought to life a new kind of masculinity, one where a man could be branded as a womanizer and also kiss his best friend on the lips (Schmidt, played by Max Greenfield), have absolutely no real-life redeeming qualities but still be seen as a sex symbol (Nick, played by Jake Johnson), or be an absolute fucking weirdo but love himself unconditionally (Winston, played by Lamorne Morris). Whether it was the way the show unabashedly tackled the dynamics of modern-day male friendship, or tackled race better than I’ve ever seen it done in a sitcom (see Cabin, below), New Girl showed an emotional consciousness that was centered in the relationships between the characters and their love for each other, but also in a rapidly changing world that sees love take many forms. If shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother gave us the sitcom as a reflection of stumbling youth, New Girl took that and added a tenderness that was wholly of the 21st century - Friends for Zoomers, if you will. In hindsight, there was little to no chance that New Girl would become what it did - after all, its original marketing tagline was “ Simply adorkable.” Eventually, however, adorkable turned into endearing, and the formula of the quirky girl (Zooey Deschanel) and her four male roommates became something much more than the sum of its parts. For another, sitcoms were just starting to move beyond the multi-camera format, relying on quick-and-easy laughs to keep viewers interested. For one, women were not widely written as the multifaceted, morally complex, antihero-potential-having characters that currently populate our screens. When New Girl first aired on Fox nine years ago, television was a very different landscape.
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