Development ,
Brett Baer,
Elizabeth Meriwether and producer/actress Zooey Deschanel at Paley Fest 2012.
20th Century Fox Television first approached playwright
Elizabeth Meriwether in 2008 to develop a pilot that was eventually shelved. After Meriwether's success with the 2011 romantic comedy film
No Strings Attached, 20th Century Fox approached her once more, and she pitched an idea for a TV sitcom about an "offbeat girl moving in with three single guys", (Nick),
Max Greenfield (Schmidt),
Lamorne Morris (Winston), and
Hannah Simone (Cece) at Paley Fest 2012. Basing Nick Miller on a friend also surnamed Miller, As the show's jokes rely on the actors' performance instead of perfectly constructed punch lines, Meriwether looked for the actors' strengths before writing. --> As a
single-camera comedy,
New Girl is neither performed in front of a studio audience nor has a
laugh track. Some scenes are cross-covered (i.e. are filmed with a shooting camera on each person at the same time), to allow for better improvisations. Handheld cameras are avoided for a more filmic look. The actors first perform scenes as written, then act out the alternatives or improvise, to later allow the producers and editors to choose the gags that ultimately work best. Morris estimated that 20 percent of each episode is improvised.
True American True American is a fictional, convoluted
drinking game that the
New Girl characters first played in the season 1 episode 20, "
Normal". After "Normal" aired, internet sources began to summarize the rules for
True American, which the characters described as a mix of a drinking game and
Candy Land where
the floor is lava; it also involves shouting the names of American presidents. The idea of
True American came from a
New Girl writer who played a similar game in college. As she could not remember the game's exact rules, the writers focused on making the game as funny on the page as possible, but only established chanting "
JFK!
FDR!" and walking on chairs. Throughout the series, the writers created new rules on the spot in order to keep the actors improvising and encouraged them to "have fun, dig in, jump in". The game's second appearance in season 2's "Cooler" was played with the strip-poker version called "Clinton Rules", but the exact rules remain unclear even to the actors.
True American with updated rules and the resulting hangover were featured in season 3's "Mars Landing". The writers started to do new
True American episodes once each year without ever giving explicit rules for the game. Liz Meriwether said the game would not be easier to comprehend in later appearances, as the writers' goal is to actually make it harder to understand. In the final episode, a children's version of True American is shown.
Relationships Creator Elizabeth Meriwether sees Nick, Schmidt and Winston "on the weirder side of things". The producers started learning more about the characters by seeing the actors' work and that "We probably rely on them more than we should" to define the characters. Each of the actors improvisations allowed for the characters to switch traits around in the first season before solidifying their characters. Producers found more variety in Nick's character in season 1 and enjoyed Johnson's improvisations, so they relayed Coach's previous attributed rage issues to Nick. Nick's character connects the most with the other roommates, childhood friends with Winston and college roommates with Schmidt, allowing him to be more involved in their stories. Writers developed the Nick–Winston dynamic in season 1 and sought to figure out Winston's relationship with the other loft mates in season 2. The writers noticed late during the first season that Morris seemed better suited to play a smart character and act as the loft's voice of reason, although Meriwether found that when Winston "finally does blow up, he's crazier than all of them" and that he works better "in these kind of crazy, comedic runners, small pieces of the episode" that contrast the relationship dramas of the other main characters. The Winston–Schmidt friendship was developed significantly in the second half of season 2 when the story focus moved to Nick and Jess. The Nick–Jess relationship affects the three guys' friendship as Nick starts being more considerate of Jess' feelings regarding shenanigans. Damon Wayans Jr. was planned to reprise his role as Coach in at least four episodes in the third season, according to Meriwether "at a time when the roommates are at odds with each other". With Meriwether's openness regarding straight and gay communities,
New Girl also plays with the guys' sexual orientation for humor. One of Winston's recurring alternate persona is Nick's gay lover "Theodore K. Mullins", which started out as an improv of Morris. Johnson thought that Nick and Schmidt had "a pretty funny bromance" with "their own little weird will-they-won't-they". Greenfield improvised kissing Nick a lot in season 1 until the writers started putting Schmidt–Nick kisses into the script, so that they shared more kisses than Nick and Jess did in the first two seasons. ==Episodes==