Ladies Be Filmin’: New Girl

The fall TV season is underway and, despite the ever-lower numbers of women in the writers’ rooms, it’s being hailed as the year of the women: 17 out of the 25 new scripted shows on the Big Five networks are female-centered and many were created by women. In this series, comedian Leila Cohan-Miccio watches the new female-centered shows and evaluates how realistic their portrayals of women actually are. Today, Zooey Deschanel quirkfest New Girl.

Is there any celebrity laden with more baggage than Zooey Deschanel? If you’re a smart, awkward twentysomething lady, odds are good that you have a strong (and likely negative) opinion about, if not actualy Zooey Deschanel, the Whole Zooey Deschanel Thing. The Whole Zooey Deschanel Thing is, essentially, the idea that it’s okay for women to be funny and weird, but only if that funny weirdness is channeled into a sort of hyper-quirk, where you’re constantly running around blushing and giggling and simultaneously eating a cupcake and playing a ukelele – in short, if you are, as the promos for Deschanel’s new show New Girl put it, “adorkable.”

New Girl follows Jess (Deschanel), who, after discovering that her boyfriend is cheating on her, moves in with three guys, douchey Schmidt (Max Greenfield), athletic dude with no game Coach (Damon Wayans Jr. for the pilot only), and recently heartbroken Nick (Jake M. Johnson, who is essentially a TV-shaped Mark Ruffalo, which I mean as a compliment). Unlike Jamie and Liana, I more or less enjoyed the experience of watching New Girl: say what you will about The Whole Zooey Deschanel Thing, but she has great comic timing. I thought the running gag of Schmidt having to put a dollar in a Douchebag Jar every time he said something gross was great – self-aware without being cloying and, even when I saw the Jar coming, it still made me giggle. And, at the end of the day, I cannot find any fault with Dirty Dancing references (have you rewatched it lately? It really holds up!). So yes. I enjoyed the half hour I spent watching New Girl. But even as I chuckled at Jess’ theme song for herself, something was making me uncomfortable. And after I deleted the episode from my DVR, that nugget started making me angry.

Because here’s the deal: we’re supposed to think that Jess is cutely awkward because she’s too smart – maybe a little like ourselves (I keep imagining the creative team going to the TV Character store and requesting “the full Liz Lemon”). But as written in the pilot, Jess is actively stupid. At no time is there any indication that she has any self-awareness about the dumb and, frankly, rude stuff she’s doing (eavesdropping on potential new roommates, monopolizing the apartment’s couch with six daily viewings of Dirty Dancing, etc.). She has no intellectual life that we can see. She spends the entire episode behaving like an extremely precocious and delightful seven year old. Seven year olds are adorable, for sure, and so is Jess, but they’re not real people yet. They’re children, and so is Jess.

Compare Jess to Liz Lemon or Leslie Knope: all three are awkward women who don’t fit into ultra-traditional models of femininity and get into a lot of scrapes because of that fact. But Liz and Leslie are a reasonably competent professional and many of their problems legitimately spring from them being smart and ambitious. Liz’s awkwardness also has an edge to it – she’s legitimately kind of mean in the way that, frankly, is true to every funny person (male or female) I know, myself included. Jess, in contrast, has no sharp edges. She’s cute, but she doesn’t make you think or challenge your perspective in any way.

Despite the show name, Jess isn’t really a New Girl – she’s just the same hipster movie one-dimensional dream girl, just in a television instead of on a movie screen.