If you like to keep up with mainstream but kind-of-quirky comedy, you’ll have noticed, and probably tuned into Channel 4’s new series, the New Girl. Just in case you haven’t been bombarded with adverts, here is a link to the trailer. The premise of the show is that beautiful-but-quirky Jess catches her man in the act with some bogey-green vest wearing hoe and thus needs a new place to live. Cue Nick, Schmidt and Winston, three relatively attractive twenty-somethings who share an apartment and are looking for a new flatmate. Of course, they wouldn’t fit the paradigm of ‘three men living together’ without oodles of Witty Man Banter, taking their shirts off and not really knowing how to talk to women. And why do they let Jess move in? “I’m tired of living with my friend! She’s a model. All her friends are models”, she explains to the three gawping men as they review her as flat mate material. And through some crazy co-incidence, after sharing this nugget of information, Jess is accepted into the shared apartment.
Although the New Girl certainly has a comedic upper hand compared to other prime-time entertainment (it is far more LOL worthy than the Big Bang Theory, lacks the cringe worthy sexism of Two and a Half Men and not as over-quoted as Friends), there is still something incredibly jarring about the show.
Just as Disney gives women unrealistic expectations of adult men, Zooey Deschanel gives men completely impossible expectations of women. Just to confirm – when women have been upset by men they do not lie on the sofa in painstakingly cute plaid shirts and skinny jeans, sporting perfectly tousled hair and tastefully natural makeup. Yes, we lie on the sofa repeatedly watching depressing films, but I think it’s fair to say that most of us look a little more Jeremy Kyle participant than Jess. The part in the pilot episode where Jess throws on a pair of dungarees and explains ‘I was going for a Hot Farmer’s Daughter type thing, like “ooh, I’m going to go milk my cows”’ was particularly off-key. She clearly did not just find those dungarees in H&M and bought them for casual wear. Hell no. She meticulously picked them out in Beyond Retro, probably mentally integrating them into her wardrobe, to be worn with a relatively-unknown band t-shirt and espadrilles.
The writing is admittedly very funny. It is riddled with comedy gold moments and looks like it has characters who can develop worthy storylines. Is it worth watching? Yes. Enviously watching Deschanel glide around in perfect fitting size 6 vintage dresses whilst still passing as ‘kooky’ and ‘clumsy’ may be painful, but it’s worth it for a fair few decent comedy moments.
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