It's morning round-up time, with quick thoughts on last night's episodes of “New Girl,” “About A Boy” and “Growing Up Fisher” coming up just as soon as you have any porn set in the Byzantine Era…
The conclusion of Linda Cardellini's “New Girl” stint mostly put Abby by the wayside to focus on the other characters' reactions to her. And as much as I enjoy watching Cardellini play comedy, the episode was the better for it – not perfect (this was perhaps the most disposable Winston subplot of the season, other than the shouted-from-another-room “That's for my dingaling!” payoff), but with some excellent sequences like Jess binging on the comforts and solitude of the hotel room, or Coach and Cece plotting about what to do with Schmidt and Abby. (The more the show has moved away from the original conception of Coach and simply let Damon Wayans Jr. be Damon Wayans Jr. – or, at least, be Brad from “Happy Endings” – the better that character has worked.) And the idea of Schmidt being both flat broke and back in the loft – with Nick and Jess struggling to share one log cabin-sized bedroom – has a lot of promise for future episodes.
Having compressed the entire plot of the book/movie into the first episode, “About A Boy” now had to demonstrate that it had additional entertaining stories to tell about Will and Marcus's unlikely friendship. Instead, “About Total Exuberance” played out like a rehash of the various conflicts of the pilot, only with even lower stakes and tension. I'll keep an eye out once we get past the episodes I've already seen – especially since a rerun of the pilot did quite well in this timeslot last week, which means the show will be sticking around for a while – but I still don't see a show here.
And whatever affection I had for “Growing Up Fisher” – based largely on pre-existing affection for J.K. Simmons – went away with its second episode, which featured various hacky sitcom plots (including two different stories about people pretending to be differently-sighted than they are) to minimal humorous effect. D.J. Nash's father actually did try to avoid letting people know he was blind, but it feels like he's taken specific real-life experiences and made them as bland and formulaic as possible, which is a shame. Too many autobiographical sitcoms fall prey to this.
What did everybody else think?