New Girl: Season 6

And with the conclusion of its sixth season, it's possible (doubtful, but possible) that New Girl is finished. If it is, cool - I approve of the way things went out. Not only are all the main characters in good places that could constitute happy endings, but the sixth season was a qualitative step up from the fifth, which itself was better than the fourth, I think. (Maybe? I dunno - the years all run together on these network sitcoms.)

Still, it's always interesting to me to look at the long-term trajectories of shows that last more than, oh, four seasons or so. Let's briefly revisit what New Girl was when it first showed up in 2011. It's easy to forget now that New Girl is a by-the-numbers hang-out comedy with a quality ensemble, but the show was originally intended to be, or at least pitched as, a vehicle for Zooey Deschanel to grace the world with her quirky, nerdy, off-center brand of cute-humor. Seriously, look at the ads and the posters for Season 1. Hell, revisit the pilot, in which Jess's three new male roommates struggle with what a weird mess she is. The show's very title reminds us that the entire premise was originally a TBS-worthy "three bros just being regular bros - until! - look who just moved in!" Observe:

The whole thing reeks of "manic pixie dream girl, but from the perspective of the manic pixie dream girl." Which is good, and gives depth and focus to the tropey type of female character that had become "a thing" in the decade prior, but still. Lo and behold, in the years that followed, "hipster" culture exploded into the millennial mainstream (to what extent, if any, this was because of Zooey Deschanel's Jessica Day character is an interesting question for another day) and "bro" culture took a well-deserved beating, reduced to an irony at best, and suddenly this notion that Zooey Deschanel was too unusual and quirky and "adorkable" for these three guys was completely shot - she was just another TV actor on a show with middling ratings. Rough!

But! Embrace the pivot! From Season 2 on - hell, probably even somewhere during Season 1 - the show stopped pushing itself as a Zooey Deschanel vehicle thanks to the emergence of Max Greenfield's Schmidt, Jake Johnson's Nick, and (eventually, though it took a few seasons to figure him out) Lamorne Morris's Winston. And thanks to those three, New Girl went form being a doomed and ill-conceived show with a dated premise to being a very enjoyable, very easy to watch hang-out comedy. You never hear it get compared to Friends - or at least I don't - but really, this is absolutely the closest any show has been to Friends since Friends. (Unless you think The Big Bang Theory is like Friends, but I don't think it's ensemble-driven enough to qualify. And don't come at me with How I Met Your Mother - that show was always structurally it's own thing.)

So yeah. It'd be unfair to say that New Girl was a surprise success or hit - Fox pushed the hell out of this thing in 2011, and frankly, it was never much of a hit - but it's definitely a show that figured out how to swim once it abandoned the anchor of its original premise. Props!

Lastly, I just want to point out that Zooey Deschanel is 37 years old. And she's not meant to be playing someone any younger - in the pilot, her character is explicitly 31. So this is a show that has always been about thirty-something roommates, and arguably Gen-X'ers at that. Weird, right? For comparison, Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry were 25 when Friends began. How long will it be before we see a sitcom with a 35-year-old still living with roommates and trying to "figure things out" in an unironic and not-sad manner?