Last night I watched the first episode of Zooey Deschanel’s new television series, New Girl<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I’ve been captivated by Zooey since I saw her in Almost Famous<\/i> a decade ago where she portrayed Patrick Fugit’s rebellious older sister. While she is a fine musician (see the She & Him albums) and an actress capable of considerable range (see Winter Passing<\/i> for one of her rare dramatic role where she turns in a nuanced performance as the selfish, drugged-out daughter of a J.D. Salinger-type), Zooey is best known as the poster child of wry hipsterism and the zany Manic Pixie Dream Girl of millions of twenty- and thirtysomethings.<\/p>\n
Here’s the premise. Jess, a twenty-something teacher, discovers one day that the boyfriend she lives with is cheating on her when she walks in on her boyfriend and his other girlfriend. She needs a new place to stay, and she responds to an ad on Craiglist for an apartment share, an apartment with three guys looking for a roomie. They take her in, she turns their lives upside down (she lives on the couch and watches Dirty Dancing<\/i> incessantly), and they take her under their wing to help her find a new boyfriend and get back on her emotional feet. In the pilot, she meets a guy and makes a date, but then he blows her off, and at the end Jess and her roomies bond.<\/p>\n
Does it work?<\/p>\n
I was a little<\/i> forgiving of New Girl<\/i> because it was a pilot, and they had to fit in the "origin story" in the first ten minutes, though I can honestly say that, were it not for Zooey, I would not have watched it.<\/p>\n
First, let’s talk Zooey, since she is probably the reason that people watched it.<\/p>\n
With the right material, she has pretty good range. New Girl<\/i>, unfortunately, doesn’t find Zooey expanding her range or leaving her hipster persona behind. Slate’s Seth Stevenson wrote of her two years ago<\/a>, “When I go on my imaginary dates with Zooey, we’re always riding around on vintage bicycles while shopping for banjos,” encapsulating in a single sentence that persona. Jess, her character from New Girl<\/i>, is a hapless twenty-something woman who is, frankly, emotionally clueless. The episode forced a lot of questions — like how did this character get anywhere, like even getting a job<\/i>, if she’s so emotionally clueless? — that it was incapable of asking. Zooey isn’t terrible, but she doesn’t have to do<\/i> anything.<\/p>\n None of the other characters, though, clicked with me — I can only remember them as Bartender, Douchebag, Coach, and Supermodel — and I felt like all of them together made the episode too crowded.<\/p>\n I felt it was intermittently funny at best — and, unfortunately, I’d seen all the funny bits in the promo reel that FOX put out over the summer to promote the series.<\/p>\n The things that interested me were the stylistic things. I liked that it had no laugh track. I liked that it didn’t look like a three-camera sitcom shot on a soundstage. Actually, it felt like it was a movie script that didn’t sell so they decided to turn it into a television show; I could see this as a 100-minute rom-com with Mark Ruffalo as Bartender.<\/p>\n For Zooey’s sake, I’ll give New Girl<\/i> six episodes. I want to see the characters develop into something more than labels, and I hope the series figures out what it’s about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night I watched the first episode of Zooey Deschanel’s new television series, New Girl. I’ve been captivated by Zooey since I saw her in Almost Famous a decade ago where she portrayed Patrick Fugit’s rebellious older sister. While she is a fine musician (see the She & Him albums) and an actress capable ofContinue reading “On Zooey Deschanel’s “New Girl””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[81],"class_list":["post-6031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television","tag-zooey-deschanel","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}