New Girl

LUCY MUSSELWHITE wants to hurt Zooey Deschanel, and then braid her hair. Confused.com.

channel 4 Comedy lucy musselwhite new girl sitcom zooey deschanel

[rating:2.5/5]

“Who’s that girrrrl… it’s Jess!” chirps Zooey Deschanel in the light-hearted sitcom New Girl (4od).

With her tendency to make up personal theme-tunes, Deschanel plays a kooky school-teacher who’s one hair short of perfect fringe when it comes to social skills. After ending things with a cheating boyfriend, her character Jess needs a place to live. Accordingly she bounds into the lives of three new male flat-mates and, despite her quirks, the girl’s got them charmed by the end of the first episode. One is them is definitely going to fall in love with her.

“Hey, let’s all not look at that girl we’re supposed to be looking at!”

Unblinking, husky-voiced, and sporting her signature granny-chic, Deschanel channels some of her own personality into the ‘adorkable’ Jess and gives a decent performance. Trouble is, the character is kind of hard to like. I can’t decide whether I want to braid her hair or punch her on the nose.  To be totally honest, I’m not really rooting for her. A bad sign. And moreover I do not accept this let’s-pretend-an-obviously-pretty-girl-is-unattractive shit. Stop it.

The other ‘main’ characters don’t overwhelm me. There’s the usual self-professed ladies’ man, Schmidt, who-really-likes-sex (Joey and Barney, anyone?), and mopey Nick who’s pretty lacking in the charisma department. The other one, Winston, popped up unannounced in the second episode to replace the briefly-aired character of Coach. I still don’t know much about him. So if New Girl is going to get better, and I think it can, these guys need to be given more of a role. Else Deschanel will continue to steal the show.

But to be fair the series is clearly still finding its feet, so we should give it time. And admittedly New Girl is growing on me. Maybe because beneath all that slightly obvious comedy a nice message starts to emerge. To the socially challenged of us: Embrace your personas. Normal shmormal. I know some ‘normal’ people actually and I’ve had more interesting conversations with my feet. In the words of Jess- “There is nothing wrong with who I am”. Naww.

That said, New Girl has got a way to go if it wants to fill the hole that Friends left in our hearts. I don’t know, perhaps it’s because the world going to end soon (again), or maybe my happiness relies far too heavily on television. But it’s 2012 and I really want something that fills my Friday evenings with the sound of my own raucous (and apparently terrifying) laughter. For the moment, New Girl isn’t quite cutting it.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVjEaa3elg4