A quick review of last night’s “New Girl” coming up just as soon as I paint a sexually-charged zero gravity tea ceremony in my closet…
There have been episodes of “New Girl” that I felt haven’t worked in one way or another, but “Landlord” was the first episode I outright hated. Outside of the brief sequence in the middle where Schmidt was telling Cece his problems and listing unsexy things (“What if I had a croissant blog?”), and possibly the choice of Rusted Root as Remy’s mood music, I found nearly all of it painful, over the top, and/or miscalculated.
While I recognize that Jess is polarizing (which the show dealt with at length with last week’s Julia storyline), I like her. I also like Nick. Yet by the time we came to the climax of their uncomfortable contest involving creepy Remy, I realized I wanted them to somehow both be wrong, because I disliked both of them so much in the context of this episode. And while Schmidt is generally a pretty broad character, his inability to differentiate flirting from conversation went way too far, and led to an episode that climaxed with one of the male characters on the verge of being molested to prove a point, and another one being beaten up by security guards who couldn’t differentiate between sex and rape.
Uncomfortable all around. Like Armen Tamzarian, I’d prefer that we never speak of this again. (Except possibly Schmidt having a croissant blog.) Then again, I saw several tweets from people calling this a great episode, so I’ll be curious to read your reactions. What did everybody else think?