New Girl star Jake Johnson candidly looks back on the show’s mixed trajectory, detailing how it declined in popularity. The sitcom was created by Elizabeth Meriwether and ran for seven seasons on Fox. But it has maintained a supportive audience due to its streaming availability, showcasing the talents of Zooey Deschanel, Max Greenfield, Lamorne Morris, Hannah Simone, Damon Wayans Jr., and Johnson. But when it concluded in 2018, New Girl‘s ratings had shrunk noticeably and lost the industry attention it once had.
During an interview with The Big Picture to discuss his directorial debut Self Reliance, Johnson also candidly looked back on the trajectory of New Girl. Though the comedy started strong, Johnson is blunt about how the perception of it started to change and what that meant career-wise. The actor, who played Nick Miller, also discussed how the final season came about and what happened when the sitcom started streaming:
The way people are responding to it now is not the way they responded while we were doing it. So, it’s different. So, when we did it, it started, and season 1 popped! And Zoe was, those billboards were everywhere, and we went from nothing to something. […] Then the second year, when we came back… the TV show got even more hype. […] I think we did the Super Bowl, season 2 or season 3, it was just getting crazy.
And then, the audiences and critics, the critics first, turned on the show. And it was somewhere around the beginning of [season] 3, we used to all go to all the awards shows, we’d be like the nerdy TV cast at like the [Golden] Globes, at like that second balcony. Zoe and Max were Emmy nominated, I believe Liz Meriweather was for the writing, if not she should have been. But we were like one of those shows.
And then overnight, we weren’t. And overnight, we were that show on Fox, that’s definitely not like a cool, like, NBC show. And I was like, ‘Ooh, how did that happen?’ And you feel it, where you’re like, oh that cool group of actors, who I’m not ‘friends’ with? Well last time I did a cool bro handshake with them, and now they’re doing it with, like, somebody else. [laughs] And I was like, ‘Well f**k ‘em anyhow!’ But there is something different.
And then all we heard week-to-week was how we were hemorrhaging numbers. And then, by then, we all knew how to look at the ratings, and that was, you know, pre-streaming, it would just drop and drop. And a certain number we thought, ‘If you get there, it’s over,’ we would get below. And then we had another year, they’d give us another chance, and Fox really tried. But we were cancelled.
We did not do on that show… You know how like, when a loved show goes off the air, they all go on, like, Leno? And they all sit in director’s chairs and go like, ‘Well, when Lamorne showed up,’ and the audience goes nuts? No talk shows for the cast of New Girl. We had, our final season, we had an eight-episode season 7. Contractually we all had to agree to it, because you don’t do eight in TV.
But Fox, after Zoe, Liz and I wrote like a letter saying like, ‘There are fans who care,’ Fox was really cool and said like, ‘We agree and we’ve loved the show.’ But it wasn’t a loved show. And then, it finished, and whatever. And then a whole new generation found it on Netflix, and they adopted it as their own. […]
What didn’t happen was any change from within. Because we were like, ‘We’re still doing the same show.’ And then what we’ve found in years past is people go like, ‘There’s not a dropoff for the audiences,’ but all the critics universally changed at the same time. And I’m like, what happened? What happened in your guys’ view between season 2 and season 3 that isn’t happening with people?
New Girl Was The Perfect Show To Find A Second Life On Streaming
Though the sitcom dipped by the time of its broadcast exit, it fits a long line of shows that were revisited or discovered for the first time on streaming. Similarly to Friends, the show is about a group of friends with their romantic entanglements and daily subplots. The couples, like Nick and Jess, or Schmidt and CeCe, were easy to root for, and the actors had sparkling chemistry.
But beyond the obvious comparisons to Friends and The Office, the sitcom has other smaller but important rewarding qualities that allow it to pop on streaming. New Girl is filled with surprising celebrity guests, whether that’s huge stars like Prince and Taylor Swift or popular actors from familiar shows like Teen Wolf‘s Dylan O’Brien and The O.C. alum Adam Brody. When the show gelled, there tended to be something enjoyable with each episode.
New Girl Season 8: Will A Revival Happen? Cast Comments & Everything We Know
New Girl ended with its seventh season back in 2018 but is there any chance Fox will revive the sitcom for an eighth season? Here’s what we know.
One of the most important aspects, however, is the episode count in itself. The sitcom ran for 146 episodes, allowing audiences to build a relationship with the core group and genuinely invest in their stories. It’s what TV can do at its best, making fictional characters seem like familiar pals that are worth checking in with. In a reversal of fortune, New Girl is now often mentioned for a possible revival because of its renewed popularity.
New Girl
- Release Date
- September 20, 2011
- Cast
- Zooey Deschanel , Max Greenfield , Hannah Simone , Damon Wayans Jr. , Lamorne Morris , Jake Johnson
- Seasons
- 7
- Website
- https://www.fox.com/new-girl/
- Cinematographer
- Russ T. Alsobrook
- Distributor
- 20th Television
- Main Characters
- Jessica Day, Winston Bishop, Schmidt, Coach, Nick Miller, Cece
- Production Company
- Meriwether Productions, Chernin Entertainment, American Nitwits, Elizabeth Meriwether Pictures, 20th Century Fox Television
- Writers
- Elizabeth Meriwether
- Number of Episodes
- 146
- Network
- FOX
- Showrunner
- Elizabeth Meriwether
