Fine, internet. You win. I started watching New Girl not so long ago and found that it's pretty dern funny, just like you kept telling me. Wait, you say, shouldn't blogs that normally concern your typical nerdery talk my ear off about "decent" TV like Mad Men or Boardwalk Empire? Probably, but you'd be unfairly throwing NG under the bus as I have for these past two Schmidt-giddy seasons. Hold your pretense at bay and go enjoy them (especially the first one).
I find that it has a fair amount of heart like a lot of great, enduring sitcoms had, but what really makes it stand out is the writing. Each individual character is very clearly voiced, and none of them stand out as a main character to be followed outside of the titular Jess. But even she takes a gracious back seat to the three male roomies much of the time, whom can riff capably with each other at a rat-a-tat speed. Pay careful attention and you'll get your requisite goofball nerd references, but tossed in with such left field nonchalance from its turbo-douchiest club turd character that it doesn't seem like pandering ("There are plenty of things to be down about; the deficit, air pollution in China, The Hobbit wasn't very good..." -a personal favorite).
But since the third season of the show has started, it's time for me to calmly lay out my objections for its current course. By the end of the second season, NG succumbed to the siren call of all sitcoms by consummating the love affair of two main characters, Jess and Nick. Now, yes, nearly every television show does this, but you can probably count on one hand the sitcoms in which it works. I like NG enough that I don't want it to devolve into the idiotic soap opera latrine that Friends spent ten years digging. While I applaud the fact that the show took two entire seasons to commit to this sort of character development -restraint by many television shows' standards- it's an awfully fine line to walk having two characters become intimate and make that show not turn into a grating shmoop-fest.
Having said all of that, let's examine a couple of the shows that actually pulled it off and why:
Cheers
Seasons: 11
Why it worked: Diane left
Cheers is fondly remembered as one of the most consistently funny television sitcoms in the medium's history. Part of the reason for this is that main character Diane Chambers (played for five seasons and in late-season cameos by Shelley Long) left the series after season five. Womanizing bar-owner and washed out ball player Sam Malone (Ted Danson, the other main character) carried on a long standing on again/ off again relationship with Diane, something of a social class opposite, through most of those seasons, and her leaving the show forced the writers to find a way to reinvent it without sacrificing both the original premise and the clever interactions of several of its characters. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Even Long didn't want to rehash the same stories over and over, as most shows where leads share a romance often find themselves doing, and Sam could return to being a bar-owning Lothario. The introduction of Kirstie Alley reintroduced the cat-and-mouse game that Sam played early on with Diane but with an opposite result, which lead to some genuinely funny television.
Scrubs
Seasons: 8 (No, the last one doesn't count)
Why it worked: The writers probably hated each other
Scrubs, to be fair, was a haphazard television show in terms of tone and overall quality. The early seasons were constructed to be reflective of life after college, with all of the uncertainty, fear, and eventual triumph or defeat therein. Roughly around the third season, the series grew closer and closer into a cartoon show staffed by live actors. While still funny, main characters went from seeming like real people with TV-necessary quirks to being neurotic caricatures that needed to be slapped in the face. Among them were main characters John "J.D." Dorian (the star and narrator of the show) and Elliot Reid whom both worked at Sacred Heart Hospital as interns before making a name for themselves later in the series as attending doctors. Throughout the show, J.D. and Elliot would occasionally hook up and even date, but it never lasted to the end of any given season. They even spent entire seasons apart and dated melange of guest stars, something the show was sort of known for. Routinely, the writers would bemoan the "will they/won't they" relationship of the characters (as seen as extras on the DVD sets, sorry I can't find a link), so J.D. and Elliot would often go down in flames in terrible ways, freeing the characters to be interesting in their own right. By the time the show was really winding down in season 7, the writers relented and let the two of them connect, and by the time the proper series ended with season 8, it was perfectly clear that the show was never about their relationship as it was about characters becoming functioning, confident adults. Love was clearly only part of that for them.
Coupling
Seasons: 4
Why it worked: Brevity + narcissism
Coupling was a smart, dirty U.K. sitcom that ran from 2000-2004, with each season spanning a mere six episodes apiece. Unfairly pegged as "the English Friends," Coupling took the premise of its erroneous comparison and bent it just enough to make it unique. Perhaps that two "main" characters of the show, Steve and Susan, got together during the first episode of the series, but the three guys/ three girls dynamic that revolved around love and sex took care of the problem immediately without sitting on the fence about it. Or so you might think; during the third season, the womanizing Patrick began a committed relationship with the vain Sally, and it worked, and partly because the show simply didn't give itself a lot of time to dwell on too many bad stories. The other key ingredient was that Patrick and Sally were completely full of themselves with just enough earnestness underneath to make them seem like people you've probably run into in your own life. Sure, they were more of side characters in the grand scheme of things, but the constant narcissism made for good comedy, even in its weak sauce final season. If anything, they were the Schmidt/ Cece analog that New Girl has been building stories around since season 1.
It is clear that New Girl does not share the qualities that helped these other shows survive the Burden of Booty. While it might seem as though the Scrubs method is the best chance it has, and I would wager more bagels that you can probably eat that it's the route the show will take, the fact that there is no real central character to follow for reflection might make this romantic trip uphill that much harder. I suppose we'll just have to sit back and let Jess and Nick show us on Tuesday evening at a time.
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