Hi, I’m Mike TV

Television for the week of April 8th. 

New Girl

 

Normal

**1/2 (out of ****)

 

The internet has already been filled with articles about this show starting off weak, and then finding it’s strength in the ensemble. So I can’t really have my article about that, but mentioning it is a prerequisite at this point. Both because I have to prove to my brethren that I too have noticed the growth, and more importantly because that’s honestly one of my favorite parts of watching television. Obviously I love getting hooked on a show immediately because it starts off great, but there’s a different kind of joy in watching a mediocre show with a couple of good moments find it’s feet. Usually the shows are put down before they can fully come into their own, but there are the rare occasions where they make it long enough to go from eh to awesome, and have a rabid fan base because of that. Because the fans were there when it sucked, and watched it try different things, figuring out how to gel its characters, or what kind of tone the show as a whole should have, or that tone is something a show should have. I’m talking about a lot of shows in all of this, and someday New Girl might be one of them. Right now, it’s still taking those faltering baby steps in several directions, sometimes adorably falling down, and sometimes obnoxiously crashing into to shit. But definitely pooping everywhere.

The string of episodes before ‘Normal’ were some of the strongest New Girl has had in its inaugural season. That’s when the ensemble really their stride, Winston stopped being completely useless, and the writers learned Jess doesn’t need to be in every scene. In fact, she’s gradually become my least favorite character. Which is an odd situation for a sitcom to be in. Shows can have unlikable protagonists, but they usually 1- are doing it on purpose (Breaking Bad), or 2- the show is about the redemption of the protagonist (Community). If you’re screaming at me right now through your computer because you love Walter White and Jeff Winger, take a breath. You seem like a crazy person to the people you live with when you scream at inanimate objects. I once got a fist fight with a mop that was mopping improperly; thinking I was alone at the time I taunted its easy defeat. Unbeknownst to me, my roommate was standing behind me. Needless to say, we are no longer roommates. I kicked him out for taking the mop’s side.

 

Back to Walter and Jeff. They are set up to be terrible. Yes, we get invested in their lives but that doesn’t make them not bad people. And those two are on opposite journeys, we get to see one crumble into the dark side while the other fights to find his humanity. With Zooey Deschanel’s Jess, the show wants you to love her. She’s supposed to be the heart of the show; the quirky ‘adorkable’ free spirit that shows everyone there’s magic in the world, while she learns she needs to grow up. If there was a font that conveyed vomit, that’s what adorkable would be typed in. As they’re trying so hard to get you to love her, which shouldn’t be hard since she’s arguably the most lovable person on the planet, they’ve made her the absolute worst. She’s open minded until something clashes with her ideas, going from happy-go-lucky to the naggiest, shrill, whining lady you’ve ever met.

 Maybe  second most shrill.

This is where the show is getting into trouble. You can’t have the title character be needlessly unlikable. I don’t think that’s their goal either, I just think they’ve figured out how to flesh out the rest of the cast by giving 2 dimensional sitcom stereotypes more idiosyncrasies and personality, but Jess started out as just a list of quirks to begin with and now they need to scramble to give her character. I want to sympathize with her as she floats around and figures out the world with the rest of the ragtag misfits that have become her surrogate family, instead I’m just relieved when there’s a scene without her. This is hard for me to come to grips with, since I’ve been in love with Zooey since I first saw her in Almost Famous. Those of you who listen to the podcast know that I’m twee as fuck, and she is the twee queen. I saw She and Him in concert (Deschanel’s band) and my knees literally buckled, that’s how not a man I am. But this show, and her character, are driving a wedge between me and my lady love, and I am not comfortable with that. I don’t think it’s a lack of talent, she’s played characters who had a range of emotion in the past just fine. But when Jess needs to emote anything besides fun and sunshine, you can see the strain in her face- like she can’t reconcile anything negative with the map they’ve drawn for the character. And that’s on her and the writers together. They need to give her the same overhaul they’ve been giving the rest of the characters throughout their season.

It comes down to motivation and journey. Each character in the show is on a set path. For the most part they’re parallel paths. Nick is a struggling bartender who dropped out of law school. In the beginning of the series, they focused more on his obsession with his ex and how he’s not good at being single. Somewhere along the line they dropped that and move the concentration onto the fact that in his early 30’s he still hasn’t figured out what he wants to do. It’s pretty nice to see on TV what’s all around you, instead of either a young hotshot lawyer living it up, or a freewheeling bartender loving his spontaneous life. Winston is on a similar road after being injured playing professional basketball in Europe, he’s drifting to figure out exactly what skill set he has. This was my least favorite character until about 2 episodes ago. He’s been fairly useless in both the story and joke department, but Lamorne Morris has pinned down delivery and physicality and started killing it joke wise. Schmidt is the breakout character of the show. He started out generic douche bag, the one roommate who had a well paying job and had the sole goal of getting laid. The show has slowly peeled back the layers to show the neurosis and damage that makes someone like that, which I honestly don’t know if I’ve seen done before- at least not this well. He’s also the most adult of the group, which is never really acknowledged ss the rest roll their eyes at his OCD-like attention to personal hygiene and little details like cooking, cleaning the apartment and not living in a shitty dorm like environment forever. None of the characters are finished growing up, but we can see where they’re headed. The show tries to make it so Jess is the impetus for all the positive changes, but they don’t do a good job on selling that point. Knowing where those characters are going to end up doesn’t make it boring, it’s watching them become there after being invested in them that pulls you back to a show over and over. They just need to set their main character on any path, or at least make it so she never needs to be angry again.

This episode as a whole was pretty weak, definitely the weakest in a string of 3-4 solid shows in a row. There were glimmers of what could make the show great one day, particularly the game of True American. It’s drinking game that involves lava on the floor and yelling out names of great Americans and famous quotes. I think. The whole episode should be about this, and I’m going to watch this episode obsessively until I figure out the rules. Anyone who calls bullshit when shows have ridiculous games the characters play have obviously never come to my house to play Game Show Game- a game friends and I invented involving teams, trivia, an illiterate host, drinking and physical challenges as punishment. It’s the best thing ever, if you really like screaming at your friends for forgetting asinine rules. Which I do. The most realistic things sitcoms can do is show us the weird traditions a group of friends has, and it’s details like this or characters randomly breaking out into Disney songs as conversation that makes believe the people behind the shows know what they want to do. Now they just need to figure out how to implement that.-MG