New Girl has been one of Fox’s most successful live-action comedy shows since it premiered in 2011. Starring Zooey Deschanel, the show has completed six seasons so far, with the seventh and final season of eight episodes set to air in April 2018.

Overview:

Teacher Jessica Day (Zooey Deschanel) moves into a Los Angeles loft with three men, Nick (Jake Johnson), Schmidt (Max Greenfield), and Coach (Damon Wayans Jr.), who she meets through an ad on Craigslist. Nick, having dropped out of law school with three semesters to go, is a bartender, while Schmidt works in marketing and Coach is a personal trainer. However, when Coach moves out of the loft in the second episode, he is replaced by Winston, Nick’s childhood best friend from Chicago who has returned from playing professional basketball in Latvia. Jess’s childhood best friend Cece, who is a model, also makes frequent appearances in the loft, though she does not live there. The show follows the roommates as they struggle to navigate their thirties, their careers, and their love lives.

Why I Binge:

I’m actually watching New Girl right now and haven’t completely caught up yet, and to be honest I didn’t like it the first time I tried to watch it a few years ago. However, a few weeks ago I thought I would try to watch it again because I have a lot of friends who like it, and I’m glad I did. Once you get past the first few episodes, all of the characters’ initially annoying qualities become really endearing. Jess can sometimes act like a child, but as the show goes on she mellows out and becomes really fun. Nick yells and gets angry a lot, but it becomes funny how ridiculously unhappy he is with everything. Schmidt is very overdramatic and Winston and Cece sometimes seem to just exist, but you find yourself rooting for them and laughing when they mess up or get themselves in stupid situations. I started watching New Girl because I needed a new show to watch and I knew that eventually they would do a crossover episode with Brooklyn 99, my all-time favorite show, but I continued watching it because I grew emotionally attached to the characters.

Why You Should Start:

The episodes are only twenty minutes, which is a prime binge-watching amount of time. All of the characters grow throughout the series and make you want to root for them, and even though they’re all in their thirties they can all be pretty relatable to a bunch of college students. No one wants to admit when they have feelings for someone, they’re afraid of responsibility, they’re still living with roommates despite the fact that they’re at least ten years out of college, and they create fun drinking games. Even though they’re adults, they still joke around and get themselves into situations that could be found on a teen sitcom, but they still refrain from using that kind of cringe-y humor. Currently, there are six seasons of approximately 24 episodes each with a final season on the way, which means there’s a lot of material to blow through in a short amount of time. Like, say, the three weeks in between now and finals week, maybe.

Where to Watch:

Netflix, and I think it’s on Hulu too