Switch on a random episode of the Zooey Deschanel-led 2010s sitcom New Girl,
and more likely than not, you ll come into contact with some absurd hijinks, or tomfoolery.
This show is, very often, very silly. But maybe just as often, it isn t. And in today s video
I want to demonstrate that, while New Girl s humour is often cited as it s best characteristic
we d do well to praise the show for another quality, too and that is it s emotional maturity.
This channel s all about taking pop culture seriously, and digging up meaning from
less-critically respected places, be that cartoons, comic-book characters, video-games,
or sitcoms. And New Girl s full of great opportunities for that sort of thing so much so
that I m regretting leaving it this long to come back to the loft on this channel. But today I want
to talk specifically about a pair of episodes toward the end of season 5, which spoiler alert
show us the end of Jessica Day s relationship with her on-again-off-again doctor boyfriend Sam,
because I think they re the perfect example of just how grown up and healthy this show can be.
In this pair of episodes named return to sender and wedding eve , it s Sam s birthday,
and an old friend from college shows up at his party. Jess is worried that they re too close.
In response to this perceived threat, Jess starts acting up, with PDA after PDA, before she realises
that she s being childish and jealous. But plot twist it turns out Sam s old friend Diane *is*
actually in love with him, and has been all along. But Sam didn t know, because her big confession
of love 10 years ago was never delivered. Jess finds out all this, and takes the decision to
tell Sam everything reasoning that if she is meant to be with Sam, then he ll choose her over Diane.
And initially it seems this big selfless Jessica Day move works out in a classic sitcom happy
ending with Sam choosing her over his past flame. But cut to the end of the next episode, and it
turns out that the happy ending didn t stick, that Sam realised Diane was the right choice for him,
and that he WAS in love with her. Jess had spent this episode avoiding Sam, because, due to a
wacky misunderstanding, she was convinced he was about to propose, and for some reason she couldn
t put her finger on, she didn t want that. But at the end of the episode, Sam figures it out.
Oh, yeah, Nick is Jess ex boyfriend, current best friend, and roommate. Should have mentioned that
up top. My bad. Nick and Sam never really got on in large part due to a shared dislike caused by
a shared jealousy both times Jess and Sam dated, Sam felt threatened by Nick s closeness with Jess,
and, this whole time, on some deep-down level, it s fairly clear that Nick s into his roommate.
But as for the point I want to make here, the reason I m making this video I want to argue
that this pair of episodes display a really clever bit of character work from the writers,
taking the same sitcom-staple paranoid, jealous-lover plot we ve seen a million
times before, and using that trope as a starting point to progress these characters arcs in really
mature ways. And this is most obvious when we re thinking about Sam. Personally, I never really
liked him before this episode I didn t like the way his insecurity about Nick made him act,
and I don t think that was a particularly unpopular opinion. Before this point, Jess was
the one caught in the middle of the jealousy and the machismo as seen in episodes like Jeff Day .
But by reversing this dynamic, by having Jess insecure about a close female friend of Sam s,
and acting out as a result, Sam is redeemed. Because Sam and Diane s bond is almost the same
as Jess and Nick s we re just seeing this same familiar dynamic from the outside, for once.
Faced with this reversal, a situation where she s effectively swapped places with Sam, and now sees
her partner sharing an impossibly close bond with another friend Jess is confronted with how Sam had
been feeling all along. This isn t a realisation she ever consciously makes herself, and Jess is
often pretty clueless, so it s possible she misses the parallel entirely but, crucially, we don t.
And the point isn t that jealousy is good, the show isn t affirming toxic emotions.
It s more that, like Jess here, and like Sam in the past sometimes you re not crazy for worrying.
And sometimes you have to address the root of that insecurity head on. Now that Jess, our
protagonist, is on the other end of it we see just what a raw deal Sam got in season 2. So when Sam
leaves Jess an episode later, in a way he leaves the relationship and, indeed, the show forgiven,
or at least understood, for stuff like this. Like I said, the parallel here between Sam and
Diane on the one hand and Nick and herself on the other initially eludes Jess, but when Sam drops
the bombshell at this episode s close, we leave the character deep in thought and reflection.
We re never shown any of the following explicitly, but I think in between this episode and the next,
Jess realises what we ve discussed above that her bond with Nick is, in some ways,
a mirror of Sam s with Diane and if those two were secretly in love the whole time, then maybe
she ought to reexamine her feelings for Nick and just why he s stayed such a big part of her life,
even while both of them have entered and exited other relationships. Maybe she ought to reflect
on why she was so eager to give Sam the chance to get out of the relationship was it maturity,
or self-sabotage? We don t know for sure, and neither does Jess but
the possibility is there, and I think we re supposed to assume Jess realises this too.
So like Sam, Jess leaves this story better off, knowing herself more honestly
and all this happens as a result of the most formulaic, trope-y setup in sitcom history
the whole jealousy thing. If you went back and looked at other sitcoms from the time,
more conventional ones, you d see a whole lot of examples of this trope being played straight.
But New Girl goes against the grain, and uses this setup to push its characters out from a
place of emotional insecurity, and toward growth. Now, granted, this is a fairly optimistic reading
of the events of these episodes you could very easily argue that this ending is a big ol downer,
and you wouldn t be *wrong*. But I think we re right to focus on the growth and
development here, and I ll tell you why. All the other storylines in these episodes focus
very similarly on growth and maturity breaking out of flawed patterns and easy solutions to become a
better version of yourself. The B-story in return to sender sees Schmidt s absentee father changing,
and being there for his son, in a way he d always failed at previously. In the next episode, Wedding
Eve, Winston worries he s come on too strong with his new girlfriend Aly, and wonders if he should
play it cool, take the sentiment back but Coach hits him with some facts. If you ve seen the show,
if you remember Coach s persona back in season 3 you ll realise how big of a step this is for
both of them. This pair of episodes even opens by explicitly foregrounding the idea of growth.
Given this background of self-improvement, and maturity, I think this pair of episodes invites
us to view Jess and Sam s breakup optimistically and as we ve seen above there s a lot of ways to
do so. New Girl isn t always the most emotionally mature show in the world just look at the pretty
contrived way Nick and Jess break up but when the writers shoot for realism and honesty
like they did here, it works really well. That s it for now, I think, though. This
one s a bit of a quickie that I threw together after realising I wouldn t be
able to get the April community video done in time, but I hope it suffices.
And hopefully it won t be another 4 months before I talk New Girl again. So thanks for watching,
and a special thank you to my Patrons onscreen now, especially Kevin Douglas and Ian Fyfield.