A quick review of last night's “New Girl” coming up just as soon as I strain the detergent…
I didn't review last week's episode, and I'm not sure how frequently I'll be covering “New Girl” in the future – not because I'm not enjoying the show anymore, but because I'm enjoying it in a way that's starting to defy any attempt at analyzing it.
It's the damndest thing with this show this season. Every week, they give us some plot that feels ancient and creaky (Nick pretends to be gay to appease Jess's new boyfriend! The gang thinks there are drugs in the apartment when a cop comes to visit!), or in some cases so thin as to be non-existent (the Guys Night subplot from “Teachers,” which I'll get back to), and I find myself simultaneously rolling my eyes and laughing hysterically at it.
So look at the Guys Night story. What the hell happened there, plot-wise, or even character-wise? Not a damn thing. Schmidt – long-established as a neat freak with OCD who cleans everything in that loft for everyone else – not knowing how to do laundry flies in the face of so much of what we've been told about him, and Winston not knowing how to use a ruler is dumb even by Crazy Winston Is Crazy standards. And yet… I could not stop laughing at Schmidt's ineptitude at using the washing machine, at Nick's ridiculous laundry lessons, and then at his incredibly simple ruler-using lesson. The guys talking Nick through his inability to love by drinking sangria and singing along to '80s power ballads with “love” in the title? Just an excuse to let three actors be silly together, and it absolutely worked. The weirder this damn show gets this season, the better it seems to be, even if it defies all narrative and character logic.
Jess and Coach at the teachers conference was the more convention of the two stories, and unsurprisingly the less funny of the two, but Jess flat-out running away from Ryan was a strong recurring gag, and Coach's rambling, drunken friendship with the other teachers (particularly “GMail”-mispronouncing Ned) was loopy and appealing in a way “New Girl” does well.
So I don't know. I can't make sense of what's happening these days. I just know that I like it. And maybe it's best if “New Girl” becomes a show I only write about occasionally – if an episode is unusually good, or bad, or just unusual even by this season's standards – rather than trying to puzzle it out like I'm Crazy Winston.
What did everybody else think?