Tonight was Megan Fox's first episode of New Girl, and I have a few thoughts on her debut coming up just as soon as my favorite show is Sax in the City, about four old ladies in a jazz band…
Given Megan Fox's inherent Megan Fox-iness, it would have been very easy for New Girl to bring her in for four weeks of the guys drooling and crawling all over each other to try to have sex with the hot new roommate. But while there's some of that in “Reagan”(*), the episode smartly turns expectations on their head at several points. Nick lusts after her, but Schmidt only has eyes for Cece, and his response to the revelation that Reagan and Cece once hooked up doesn't inspire predictable lesbian/threesome fantasies from him, but instead paralyzes him with jealousy, some Nick Cannon air drumming, and his usual fear that he's not good enough for her.
(*) Giving Fox's character a first name so close to her own (even if it's pronounced here in the non-rhyming fashion) is dangerously close to Tony Danza/Banta/Micelli territory.
The show also front-loaded Fox's first scene with a good run about the side effects – “butt sneezing, hysterical deafness, dusty semen” – to the other medication, so that she was being introduced not only in a capacity where she was delivering the jokes rather than being the subject of them, but in a way that quickly established what a bulldozer Reagan is. Fox isn't going to be as funny as the New Girl regulars (including the absent Zooey Deschanel), but she's funny enough to work for a month, and Reagan's directness should serve as a good catalyst for the other people in the loft to turn inward and be even crazier than usual.
I enjoyed the two previous Deschanel-less episodes (especially the first) enough that I'd have been okay just sticking with the guys and Cece until Jess returned, but this was a funny episode and a promising start to Fox's time here.
What did everybody else think? Refreshing change of pace? Shark jump? In between?