Syne Scratch

Hey look, the site has a new name that I’m not going to explain. Hey look again, the “about” section has been filled in. Hey look for a final time, the film rankings have expanded to 25 films.

I just finished a rewatch of New Girl for the first time since it ended and it remains a very solid sitcom. Legitimately, some of the one liners in it are the best I’ve seen. That said, it has several bizarre eccentricities worth mentioning.

Let’s begin with the title. The show is so named because Jess is the new roommate in an apartment with three guys. The aptness of this title, by design, dwindles with each subsequent episode and there’s an argument to be made that it doesn’t even apply by episode two because Winston moves in after her.

We should actually talk about Winston, a character that only enters the show because the actor that played Coach, Damon Waynes Jr., had to drop out after the pilot. This is made weirder by the fact that Waynes returns for a season long stint as a cast regular later in the series.

Now we can mention the craziness of the cameos this show was able to pull. Taylor Swift was one thing (her cameo is made funnier by a throw away line later in the series about Jess being afraid for her safety when she is living alone in New York), but somehow Prince liked it so much that he came on and let the writers just make an entire episode about him. For those not in the know, Prince doesn’t act.

It’s interesting seeing how many noteworthy quirks there were in a sitcom that seems to be mostly forgotten by the oeuvre at his point in time. Max Greenfield was the breakout star of the show and he’s been stuck in sitcom purgatory since then (no apologies to fans of The Neighborhood, find yourself some better taste).