Stealing the Show by Joy Press

Author:Joy Press [Joy Press]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571342457
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

While Tina Fey made the unorthodox choice to spurn romance between her two central characters, Meriwether quickly decided that Jess and Nick would fall in love. Jess looks like she is made of sunshine, whereas Nick looks like he never changes his underwear: perfect odd couple. Sitcoms invariably stretch out sexual tension between primary characters for as many seasons as possible, and that was the New Girl writers’ original plan, too. The script for the season-two episode “Cooler” didn’t have Nick and Jess kissing at all—but when it came time to shoot the last scene, right before Christmas break, the chemistry between Deschanel and Jake Johnson was overwhelming.

Meriwether ran on set and told them to go for it. “It felt dishonest not to do the kiss based on what we led ourselves to in that episode,” Finkel recalls. “How could we not do it? Which I think is what made that moment really powerful for fans of the show. They were feeling what we were feeling.”

A great fan of rom-coms, Meriwether nevertheless realized too late that television narratives require a kind of long-term thinking different from that of movies: “It doesn’t end when they come together. Having to continue to tell the story was difficult, and it changed the tone of the comedy. Suddenly, all of Nick’s flaws were very amplified. He was now her boyfriend, so all this stuff that seemed hilarious got really dark. Oh no, he’s an alcoholic and he doesn’t have a checking account—he’s actually a really messed-up guy!”

The series’ other odd coupling, Schmidt and Cece, emerged accidentally. Finkel says, “We just put them together in an episode because we thought it would be funny for her to be treating him like a dog. She literally leaves him in the car while she goes into a club. But she made him funnier, and he made her funnier. He’s not just a douche bag now, he’s a douche bag who falls really in love. We knew, Oh, my God, we’ve got to keep doing this.”

Meriwether enjoyed playing with the formal limitations of the comedy genre to keep the series speeding in fresh directions. But it turns out that viewers don’t always want a sitcom spinning too far out of its familiar orbit. In season three, the writers’ decision to break up Schmidt and Cece and have him date two women backfired. “We were very excited about that in the writers’ room,” Meriwether remembers. “Schmidt is going to be this evil person! And the audience just hated it. It didn’t occur to me that if you are turning on a show after a long day of work, you don’t necessarily want to see these characters radically change. You want to see the same thing. For that moment in season three, we thought of ourselves as a cable show—and it didn’t work.”

Ratings dropped to an all-time low that season. Some execs suggested there was not enough “guy energy” to attract male viewers; they wanted more stories about bros out in the city getting laid, Meriwether recalls.

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