New Girl’s Characters Are ALMOST Perfect

welcome to law 4d this is probably one of the more formative settings for myself personally and basically everything i do artistically as weird as that sounds especially if you've been following and know my interest it's true while new girl is nowhere near a perfect piece of television nor is it anywhere near on the level of so many other shows in terms of pure quality new girl is one of the most important shows to me and there's a reason for this and the reason for this is very simple new girl understands one thing better than almost any other show that's tried to replicate friends since well friends it's about character dynamics and how to write a genre the buddy genre and it's all encapsulated perfectly in one perfect episode that's this one right here the setup is fairly simple winston is finally on his way to becoming a cop but to finally reach that goal well winnie has to have one of his chiefs come in and do an at-home interview basically a part of the background check process it's a personality check to ensure that you are fit to be an officer of the law is this real i don't know do real police officers go through this i have to imagine not but in here it's what's happening this kind of setup is called a lot of different things in television i call it the time bomb setup and essentially that's a setup for an episode of a sitcom that is clearly designed to explode after a certain period of time into well chaos we find out what that chaos is very early see jessica day realizes that there is a police officer coming to their home and remembers oh yeah i have this bag here what's in the bag well jessica believes that this here is crack and she now has to find a way to get rid of this contraband before maybe ending up in prison or worse ruining winston's chances of being a cop let's talk about why this setup works and how it works so well if you've been following the show it is serialized in nature you know that winston's path to finding something he actually wants to do a career has been seasons long this is a huge deal it's not like one day he woke up and said i'm gonna be a cop and it's just another couple episodes of the season this is the thing for the first time that winston really wants to do and it's the first thing he feels he's capable of doing jess sees that passion and well doesn't want to ruin that and we the audience don't want winston's shot ruined either so set up grounded in character now let's move on to part two which is the genre itself the buddy genre is a really interesting genre essentially it's a genre of sitcom that revolves around what seems mundane in principle but is more true to life in a sense here are a group of friends that are living their lives they don't all work in the same office necessarily they don't have crazy jobs they don't work for the parks and rec department or at 30 rock they just live together or near each other and hang out a lot that's it examples of this how i met your mother friends obviously what's important about this genre is that the characters are everything here there's no underlying setup there's no mystery there's nothing driving narrative outside of relationships it is the sitcom version of a soap opera essentially now to be clear i don't mean in terms of drama i mean in terms of the foundational principles simply being the people on your screen so you have to write your characters the right way and each and every one of them need to be distinct and that is where new girl absolutely nails its writing let's go through this episode and talk about what each of these people are doing and how each of these people are staying true to their character in the process of one incredibly chaotic 22-minute series of events winston is very nervous this is in winston's nature he's very obtuse socially and you see that throughout the episode he doesn't understand why people are acting weird we see him miss social cues and we see him not understand the social situation he's in almost every second of the episode now what do we know about nick miller before this well we know nick's a bad liar we know he wants to be a writer and we know he's terrified of the law and does not trust the government so what does nick do throughout this episode well here we see nick become an absolutely terrible liar we see him fail with the one thing that he's supposed to be good at which is construct a story and we see sweat back return here everything about nick miller comes together in this episode schmidt flamboyancy manipulative and pretentious you're going to get absolutely all of that here just cc the point here without belaboring it is that each of these characters have had seasons to grow and become people that the audience recognizes what makes this episode so great and what makes the show so great is that for the most part they never abandoned those personalities in this episode we get an opportunity like good time bob episodes create to see through the facade and into the characters that we know underneath there's no pretense here everything we know about nick miller is here in this episode everything we know about schmidt cc everything we know about winston it's all here which is not only what makes body genre show so interesting but it's also what makes timebomb episodes so great we see our characters put on acts until their true selves reveal themselves through some external force in this case the background check but to hone in on the fourth factor of this episode the thing that makes it so great on top of those things we've already discussed we have to kind of look back at what it means to serialize character now this is something so many shows get wrong what does serialization mean it simply means that episode episode season is season the story continues they aren't bottle episodes like you might get from a drake and josh serializing character is very difficult not only does it require you to remain consistent but it requires you to get it right relatively immediately so that you don't create this ever revolving personality now new girl wasn't always the poster child for this in fact i would say it was the opposite winston is a great example the original version of winston bishop is the straight man he was the guy in the loft that was more grounded that wasn't always in on the joke he wasn't missing it he just didn't care he was the mature one he wasn't the shenanigans guy what the writers eventually realized relatively quickly is that this straight man routine wasn't working it was making winston a character that stood out instead of fitting in which in the case of the buddy genre is pertinent so they slowly rewrote winston into this guy this socially awkward hyperactive cat-loving prankster who goes from being the most mature member of the group at the beginning of the show to by far the zaniest and least grounded character just a few seasons later now this change was for the better but the point is is that when you serialize character you have to get it right and that is what makes this episode work and there's nothing to do with the episode itself the chaos of this episode works because we know how these characters are going to respond so there's not a level of suspense we're not worried they're going to go to jail or prison we're just excited to see them be themselves and it's the minutia and the nuance of that that makes us laugh that's funny not necessarily character unpredictability which is what writers get wrong a lot on tv which is that characters always need to defy expectations but sometimes there's comfort in not doing so especially in comedy now that can't always be the case otherwise you'd make a lazy show that doesn't surprise anybody but there should be consistency and finally what i think new girl gets right so often while still working within the confines of the genre is landing the joke the gang spends the entire episode trying to get rid of these rocks they try to put them down the shower just stuffs them in her shirt they try everything they can slowly one by one each member of the group realizes that there is a giant felony size bag of narcotics in the apartment and we get the joke of each individual reaction now we still think that jess has really found a bag of narcotics and it isn't until the end of the episode where the joke gets landed and that is also what's so great in sitcoms about time-bomb episodes is that usually your conceit is also the primary joke hear bag of drugs how do we land the joke well that's right that bag was simply aquarium rocks and not a single member of the gang realized that more importantly jess even believed that she was high from contact we get a little bit of character growth out of all this comedy from winston we get the key to the buddy genre everybody coming together and trying to land on the same sword for each other we find out winston is going to be a cop and everybody lives happily ever after but what's important is that narcotics become the joke a new girl lands the joke all this is to say that new girl was one of the better body genre shows to ever exist at least in my opinion now to i think new girl is a phenomenal tv show from a qualitative perspective is it going to blow your mind in terms of its writing plot development narrative directing absolutely not it's not attempting to do any of those things and it certainly doesn't accomplish any of those things new girl is what i sometimes call a comfort show it doesn't test my mind but it feels like home which is all the buddy genre is trying to accomplish and that's what i think is worth recognizing here this genre is very very difficult it requires you to not only find excuses to put normal people in abnormal situations but it also requires you to write people that other people will care about and that is the biggest hurdle in screenwriting character anybody can think of a wacky idea anybody can think up a new kind of alien invasion or a new shipwrecked shark movie but can you write people that make people care about people that's what matters the end of the day human beings just want to relate to other human beings just like they want to relate to art so if you decide to sit down and write in this very small tiny buddy genre the only piece of advice i can give is just make sure you're dressed like a day would go to prison for your winston bishop over some aquarium rocks well guys that's it for today's episode of nostalgic if you enjoyed this one press the like button down below if you haven't done so also hit subscribe and hopefully i will see you guys in the next [Music] video

Channel: Nerdstalgic

Views: 317,251

Keywords: New Girl, New Girl TV Show, New Girl Series, New Girl Perfect Episode, New Girl Background Check, New Girl Jess, New Girl Nick Miller, New Girl Best Of, New Girl Compilation, New Girl Winston, New Girl Schmidt, Scrubs, It's Always Sunny, Friends, How I Met Your Mother, 2 Broke Girls, Brooklyn Nine Nine, Sitcoms, Sitcom Perfect Episode, TBS Sitcoms, Nerdstalgic, Nerdstalgic Perfect Episode, New Rockstars, Corridor Crew, Collider, IGN, Nerdist

Id: PMuUvFRxqAM

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 21 2021