New Girl - Episode 1.01 - Pilot - Review

"Who's Jess? You're talking to… Tiger Boobs." —Jess

When you finish watching the pilot of Fox's New Girl, you'll realize the pitch for this show went somewhat like this: "Well, we've got this quirky girl who sings randomly at times… like a Zooey Deschanel-type." And then someone said, "How's about we actually get Zooey Deschanel!?" And then they proceeded to get Zooey Deschanel, whose quirkiness shines with this character Jess.

But as for the pitch for the actual story of the show, well there isn't much different here. This is basically the classic sitcom (even down to the theme song) storyline of two very different people who had to become roommates — except it's four people, and one's a girl. (If two's company, and three's a party, what does that make four?) And the characters aren't even very original. Jess is a crazed girl who was just broken up with and decides to watch Dirty Dancing* ad nauseam; Schmidt is some womanizer (or just really loves women) who says toolish things like "let me talk to mah boys"; Nick is just as sick of love as Jess; and Coach is a caricature who yells every sentence (because he's a personal trainer, but that doesn't excuse how annoying it is).

*Which is widely typical but strangely out of place. I've never known for this to be a breakup movie. More fitting is if Jess watched (500) Days of Summer, but then Zooey Deschanel as Jess would be watching Zooey Deschanel as Summer and that would be too meta for this show, obviously. But Dirty Dancing provides for the pivotal moment in the pilot where everyone is onboard with Jess being the new girl in their group and they all sing "Time of My Life."

But I do, however, enjoy that Jess sings to herself a lot ("a looot!"). I feel like that's a habit many people have that's not really shown on TV with the potential to be quite comical. That and filler phrases people say, like, "Let me tell you." Of course this only works if everyone else is annoyed. And I did find it amusing that these guys have a urinal in their bathroom (at least I think I saw one); though I don't appreciate how much they want to shove down our throats that these are guys, audience, they're male!!! and Jess is female, how's she going to react to this urinal!?, I admit I want a urinal in my bathroom.

New Girl is full of those amusing moments that don't really get me laughing, even brilliant moments. For instance, Schmidt taking off his shirt and saying "This is LLS: Ladies Love Schmidt" to which Coach yells (as he always does) "WHAT? Put a dollar in the jar!" and you think it's a swear jar for a second but it turns out to be a Douchebag Jar. Absolutely brilliant. But not exactly hilarious. And there are moments like when Jess is stripping and begins sing-narrating "She's doing something with the pillow," then knocks something over, "I'll pick that up laaateeerrr" which made me roar with laughter.

Come to think of it, there aren't many laugh-out-loud moments that don't include Zooey Deschanel. Even the theme song made me laugh with her singing delivery and her pose. "It's Jess!" This is very much The Zooey Deschanel Show… and that's not exactly a bad thing, because she's pretty hilarious.

But that doesn't mean all of these actors and characters don't have fantastic chemistry, because they do. Though with Damon Wayans, Jr. replaced in episode two, anything could happen.**

**Mostly, I hope they make the character stop yelling. You could tell Wayans was trying as much as he could to make it funny. Personally, he only succeeded with his "Sccchhhtop it. Scchhhtop." Meanwhile, walking into Jess's bedroom to ask how to talk to women was as unbelievably mismatched to the rest of the pilot as it was cliché. Thankfully, the show really makes use of its Family Guy / 30 Rock-esque cutaways. That, and Deschanel's delivery of a "couple things you can work on: one, lowering your voice; uh, two, listening; uh, three, rage…" while Wayans chimed in with a "right on" and "absolutely" after every point she made, also known as the quietest his character ever is.

New Girl, currently in competition with Ringer for me, is going into the watch-online-the-next-day pile… for now, but that's probably because I've never watched Raising Hope to round out the hour.

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