httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qqojuj1zoU
(Editor’s Note: This was written before actually viewing the show until further notice)
Regarding the thought process going into greenlighting FOX’s New Girl, one can only assume a haughty business executive saw Zooey Deschanel and thought that she looked enough like Katy Parry to greenlight an entire TV series based around her.
Before we go any further, I should preface by saying that I hate Zooey. She takes the “indie pixie” look invented/perfected by Natalie Portman in Garden State and bastardizes it to the point where she looks like a hollowed zombie staring into the camera in an attempt to steal your soul.
So here we are, watching FOX’s Zooey vehicle. The commercials/trailors unveiled so far rely on one single point: Zooey Deschanel being a cute, quirky, nerdy living with three handsome men. Surprise: That IS the entire show.
To add to her mystique, she occasionally wears glasses that look lensless and fake, even on Youtube. Pretty much the only positive aspect I can find out of the first episode is that the costuming boss saw fit to put Zooey in some flannel.
I will spare you the excruciatingly contrived details of the plot, but to quickly break it down: Zooey is an unbelievably gorgeous girl living with some unbelievably hunkish men. Both parties are down on their luck with the opposite sex, wouldn’t ya know it! There is some painfully generic character development of the men, but the focus is naturally on Zooey. Hilarity inevitably ensues as Zooey is too quirky to land even your basic bar pickup artists.
There are two things that are painfully clear about this sitcom: 1) It is only going to last one season 2) it will be rife with will they/won’t they hookup tension between Zooey’s character and her new male roommate(s). Fortunately, for both reasons, we will all be spared a five season Sam-and-Diane arc.
Of course my main issue with show is that it will NEVER address the real problem with living with a woman: they use roughly 3 times the toilet paper men do.
(Editor’s Note: Anything written after this point were written after viewing the show)
I was right.
Random Thoughts:
- The real irony is that the dude-mates in this show have a thing called a “douchebag jar” in which they toss a dollar every time one of them is a douchebag. Assuming FOX was tipping my “douchebag jar” for watching this show, I would be $1414 richer.
- Zooey walks out of the shower clothed and not wet at all. Instead of calling attention to this blatantly stupid thing that just happened and building on her ‘crazy character!’, they make a motorboating joke.
- The individual roommate-on-roommate ’get to know you/blatantly try to have sex with you’ scenes are at least ten times worse than you’d assume from the previews.
It isn’t even worth examining what else happens. The dude-mates learn the TRUE MEANING OF FRIENDSHIP in the end. It turns out 3 jabronis can be friends with a woman without trying to score with her (in the first episode, too much).
I don’t want to be harsh. If every show was judged solely on its first episode, Arrested Development would still be on the air today and Parks And Recreation would have been canceled years ago. The state of television is a depraved and outright bizarre place where shows that deserve to live forever, die, and shows that started out bad, flourish. In between the two extremes there is crap like Perfect Couples, the Paul Reiser show and New Girl.
Besides. The roommate-bros end up admitting that Dirty Dancing is a good movie at the end, and if that isn’t reason for cancellation, I don’t know what is.
The only thing to add is this Youtube I found where Zooey talks about the theme song for the show, which she wrote. She spends 2:33 talking about her thought process on a theme song which literally lasts 7 seconds in the show. Unlike the rest of this review, this isn’t a knock or a bitterly sarcastic complaint. It’s unfortunate with someone with real musical talent is reduced to creating something so short that I can’t even dice a lettuce-and-bread sandwich during it.
