A quick review of last night’s “New Girl” coming up just as soon as we get physical with a baby…
“Longest Night Ever” wasn’t the funniest episode of season 3, but it was perhaps the sanest and most consistent. Having the action all play out on a single night, and having all the pieces – Coach and Cece’s date, Jess trying to prevent Schmidt from ruining said date, and the search for the missing Ferguson leading Crazy Winston to a crazy love connection – connected to one another really helped. There are times where “New Girl” episodes play like a lot of weird ideas that got thrown at a wall at the same time, some of which are funny, some of which just happened to stick. This was an episode where the parts all fit together, where the characters for the most part seemed like themselves – even Coach, who’s still being defined, has a consistency with his trouble getting over the break-up (and Damon Wayans Jr. is great at playing a guy faking self-confidence) – and where nothing stuck out like a sore thumb.
It was a good example of Jess and Nick’s relationship just being a fact of life, rather than having to force in another crisis of confidence for the two of them. There was the joke about her having thoughts of marriage, and she got annoyed when he left her with Schmidt (and without the dog cage he obviously should have bought), but both of them were allowed to exist independently of each other without it being a big deal, and both got to react amusingly to the craziness of Schmidt and Crazy Winston. (Crazy Winston’s flirting with Bertie the bus driver was fabulous: so weird and yet so obviously a turn-on for both of them.
Jess accidentally hitting Schmidt with her car(*) a second time was dumb, but other than that, this one clicked.
(*) I had no memory of Jess getting the car with the flames on it. When I asked on Twitter, someone mentioned it happened during the trip to Mexico in the season premiere, which I watched through a painkiller haze at the hospital. Does anyone else recall this happening, or were you also confused that Jess, like Alan Arkin in “The In-Laws,” had flames on her car?
What did everybody else think?