If your entire life blows up you might as well watch New Girl

On friendship, chaos and heartbreak, and Nick Miller fist-pumping to Cotton Eye Joe

By the middle of season 5 of New Girl, you’ve mostly forgotten why it’s even called New Girl in the first place - you’re deeply immeshed in the intricacies of all the character-driven storylines, usually relating to romances and career aspirations. It’s a sitcom that, like Friends or even Sex and the City, focuses on the lives of a group of friends, and their hijinks. There’s just an abundance of hijinks, a saturation of them, with not much but setting connecting them all together. There’s no big bad, no overarching mission except some gentle goofs. I think it’s a really funny show - and it gets more unhinged.

But when you go back to the pilot episode of New Girl (which is SUCH a pilot, strangely stilted and full of exposition), you’re forcibly reminded that the show actually does have a defined angle, that the name means something. After finding out that her longterm boyfriend is cheating on her (and catching him in the act, Bridget Jones style), Zooey Deschanel’s Jessica Day is forced to move into a loft apartment with three single men. A robust opportunity for hijinks.

Who’s that girl? She is the titular new girl in the apartment, and the situation is considered a kind of fall from grace for her. She went from having a boyfriend, a house they shared, a career and a romantic path towards marriage and stability - to having almost nothing. She is adrift on the chaos of life, battered by the winds of misfortune, and that loft apartment is the cobbled together ship that she’s trying to ride it out with, her crew a band of loveable weirdos.

At the end of the pilot, she gets stood up on her first rebound date, and her new housemates and friends turn up to the restaurant and loudly serenade her. It’s the romantic grand gesture that you get at the end of a rom-com, except it’s not romantic - it’s friendship. It’s a show where the grand gestures are often from friends, showing their friends how much they mean to them. I’d personally rather die, but it’s the gesture that matters here.

When you truly remember this as the premise of the show, it makes all the hijinks that come afterwards, the chaos of being in your thirties and not “settled down”, the messiness of every character and their foibles, much more interesting and funny - and relatable.

Soft rebooting your life

I’ve been watching New Girl recently because I’ve found that it’s an oddly comforting show, entirely because of the premise of Jess and her friends scraping together meaning in their lives from community and friendship after having everything blow up in their faces.

I’ve found myself in a similar situation this year. At the end of last year, I was working as a lifestyle reporter for ABC News, having a great time and really enjoying my team and the writing I was doing - but also found myself in trouble after signing an open letter from journalists to media outlets asking for fairer standards of coverage about the invasion of Palestine by Israel. I was pulled into an official disciplinary over the letter (and specifically my tweets sharing the letter and repeating the sentiment), despite the fact that the letter actually repeats the stated aims of the ABC’s impartiality rules that I apparently transgressed. There was also a funny tweet about Albanese being so spineless that he could suck his own dick backwards, which I just genuinely forgot would be seen as biased. While this was happening, other ABC employees including Antoinette Lattouf were being fired, so combined with some other incompatibilities with the position and some exciting new book opportunities, I decided to quit before I was officially let go or whatever, and stand in solidarity with the journalists losing their jobs for making an ethical stand.

While I was at peace with my decision (I have no desire to be a journalist if I have to compromise on truthful reporting - but also I was a lifestyle journalist, I was writing about different kinds of SANDWICHES mostly, so I’m not sure why it was even an issue, but whatever), it was a disclocating situation to find myself in. Suddenly without a job, unsure about the future of my journalism career, and desperately hustling for freelance money because I was crazy broke.

Then only a week later my relationship was ended, and along with having no job or money, I had no house or belongings or dog or partner - and instead left floundering in the deepest pool of loneliness and heartbreak and fear I’ve ever experienced. (I’m fine, no bad blood, it is what is it).

When dramatic things like this happen, a common phrase is that you are “torn” away from something. I’d never really examined that language, but when everything like this happens so quickly, so surprisingly, torn becomes the only relevant word to describe the feeling. You’ve been ripped away from everything you know, and it’s shocking and painful and raw and messy.

This isn’t a pity party - in some ways lately i’m actually thriving lol, some amazing career news recently. But I mention it because I think it’s put me in the same place as Jessica Day in the pilot, and has confirmed for me that New Girl is the show to watch when your life has imploded.

Just friends?

Before I left Melbourne to go and stay in my parent’s guest room, my friends in Melbourne got me out of the house and gave me a space to be an absolute gibbering wreck with them. If you’ve ever wondered what to do when someone you love has had their heart broken, that warmth of friendship is absolutely the answer. It was the first of many friendship gestures from the people in my life that kept me sane and loved. I had friends send me flowers, I had friends inviting me to dinner. I’ve had a lot of very patient people endure my trauma dumping and my shift into being an unrepentant crisis friend.

I also started reading Gyan Yankovich’s new book Just Friends - it’s an eminently quotable book, and taking some time to read her warm and astute study of friendship has been comforting in itself. It’s a reminder of the blessing that friends bring to my life, and how I can continue to nurture them and prioritise them in my life (I love my solitude, so this is often a balancing act for me).

But one takeaway that I found really interesting was her point about the “difficulty” in finding friends. I’ve been through that recently, as I wrote about here for the ABC, and it was my newly cultivated friends who were there for me when I needed it.

Gyan makes the point that “meeting new people and finding community isn’t always necessarily easier than finding somewhere to live or work. In fact these things are often more connected than we might imagine”. She goes on to say that cultivating friendships has barriers beyond things like having bad vibes or being unpleasant to be around - there are financial barriers, time issues, the rapid diminishment of third spaces to socialise in.

For me, this confirmed my decision to move back to Melbourne - while I had no job or house or any other pressing reason to be in the city, I did have something that I realised I’d done a disservice by not prioritising - three years of cultivating friends and community. We are taught not to prioritise our friendships and community in mainstream society - but that’s something I’ve decided to do. (also, the rent in sydney is fucking insane, I’d have to be an idiot. I do love the beaches though).

Loveable loser seeks loveable weirdos

The comfort I’ve found in New Girl is a really simple truth - doesn’t matter who you are, doesn’t matter what your situation is, sometimes your life falls apart. And sometimes you find something really beautiful, either as a result or because your priorities are forced to shift.

Jess Day is a particular sitcom trope, a “loveable loser” - but unlike others of the genre, the Liz Lemons for example, she’s not someone at peace or static with that designation. She sees herself as a motivated, happy person, who in the first episode is forced to slum in failure Her growth, like many of the loveable weirdos in the loft with her, is actually finding out who she is when life isn’t bending to what she wants. Finding out what’s important to her, outside of jobs or relationships. And the base constant, the foundation for the show and eventually for her, is this community in the loft (I will NOT say ‘chosen family’). It’s very heterocentric - but it doesn’t diminish the message.

I actually wonder if New Girl’s somewhat underrated status comes from the fact that the show didn’t lean into the millennial hustle culture that defined shows of that era. The fact that friendship as a priority was the base message of the show, rather than something like Parks and Rec’s career centred happiness was off message - and actually feels more relevant today in this era of quiet quitting and the like.

Age is somewhat fluid in this show, but it is nice that mostly everyone is in their 30s - this kind of sharehouse chaos lifestyle is seen as normal for twenties, but weird for (het) adults, who should be raising children in the suburbs while working at a mysterious nuclear factory, or whatever the plot of Don’t Worry Darling was, I’ve forgotten. While it’s sometimes confronting for the character’s to be younger than me and bemoaning their terrible life choices while I’m in an objectively worse situation than them, it’s mostly just relatable and even joyous.

There is so much joy to be found in New Girl, and as a result, joy in community. One of my favourite recurring things is the invented game of True American that they play in several episodes, an explosion of chaos and hilarity that mostly involves excessive drinking and shouting about US history. It reminds me more of my time at university than it does my 30s, but it shows that things like proximity are a big part of what can define a friendship. My university friendship group is no longer a cohesive unit, after we lost that unifying glue that is physically going to a campus together every day for three (or nine technically, I’m very slow) years. The loft creates a physical foundation for them too - but even when apartment hunting in Melbourne, I’ve kept proximity to my pals in mind (I can’t do the share house anymore, I’m so old and cranky).

A friendship should and will change over the course of a lifetime, but there’s nothing wrong with making the decision to help friendships and community flourish in your life, by making choices to live with them, or lean into hobbies, or whatever.

But the final comfort I’ve found in re-watching New Girl is the fact that as all the loveable weirdos become more fleshed out, and Jessica Day becomes less of a protagonist and more a part of the ensemble (which is pretty much done by season 2), you realise that every character is a kind of blueprint for different forms of life chaos. Each character is a different flavour of mess, meaning when you’re going through just a whole storm of different feelings, you’ll always find someone to hold on to. Someone who speaks to you with their poor decision making.

You’ve got Schmidt who is objectively successful in his career but also ridiculous and not able to admit he craves love. You have Winston who struggles with both purpose and confidence. You have the avatar of chaos himself, Nick Miller, who has all the mannerisms and politics of an eighty year old man, who keeps all his money in a sack and thinks the moon landing was “definitely fake”. I relate to Nick a lot, as for many seasons he’s whole thing is writing a truly terrible zombie novel, and as someone who is usually writing a book, it’s a weirdly humiliating process - my favourite quote from Nick’s book is: “Mike Jr said to his father, Mike Sr, who sucks”.

You have Coach, played by an actor who was in the pilot and then brought back later in a stroke of luck, and whose character just subsequently never really got fleshed out. All of them are flailing wildly through life, and leaping from minor victories into defeats, struggling to find meaning in their lives. And the best bit is that they’re never ever given a magic elixir that provides that meaning - they never find a relationship or a job or a marriage or a calling that “saves” them from their circumstances.

“My room mates are killing me! No, you’re right. I like them, I hate myself,” admits Nick to his old man best friend Tran. There’s an idea, underlying the hijinks and the goofs and the monster of the week romances, that we are never brought truly and inherently low by these big changes in our lives, never humiliated by, say, being an elder millennial living in his parent’s guest room, watching New Girl and sobbing quietly so I don’t wake up the dog.

“You’re not the only one who’s hurting here Jessica Day. The economy stinks, the bees are dying, movies are pretty much all sequels now, and I… have a broken penis”.

There’s an idea of misery in New Girl as an unfortunate experience - unlike some shows it doesn’t make bad luck and suffering the point or humour of the show - but one that will pass, and not because of any kind of toxic positivity (although that is Jess’s biggest character flaw).

Instead, and this is what makes it comforting, failure is seen as a normal thing that will affect everyone at some point, but one that doesn’t reflect inherently on who you are. When your life is stripped of important things, comforting things, even necessary things, New Girl basically shows that there’s no right way to deal with it, that chaos is storm that blows on us all, and that at our lowest we can still find something - a group of friends, a crazy loft full of weirdos, a nice dog - to rely on.

That’s comforting. I don’t think it matters HOW your life has blown up, but chances are New Girl would be a good show to sink into like a bathtub full of warm jelly.

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