New Girl Is Still the Best TV Show About Male Friendship

I’m a big believer in TV show astrology. You know—the online quizzes that tell you, based on a number of factors, the characters you resemble, all of it related in the style of a birth chart. For instance, my Seinfeld chart has me at Costanza, Elaine ascendant. I’m also a Sex and the City Charlotte, Carrie rising. My Office one is probably a Stanley moon, Kelly rising and, thankfully, I take medication for that. But when it came to New Girl, one of my favorite shows of the last decade, I was never quite sure which character I really identified with, at least until I checked back in with the series in anticipation of the pilot’s 10th anniversary this week.

I don’t really remember why I started watching New Girl in the first place. In hindsight, I’m shocked I ever did. That’s not for any reason in particular. The titular new girl was Zooey Deschanel, right as we were in the midst of a truly awful “twee revolution” for which she was the poster child. And the formula alone—girl moves in with three guys; kookiness ensues—seemed very “Friends did that” to me. Yet I started anyway, and I was quickly hooked. When the show hit Netflix in 2013,I binged the first season and then the second. By the time the third season rolled around, I was caught up and ready to watch the misadventures of Jess, Nick, Schmidt, Cece, Winston and Damon Wayans Jr.’s Coach (who left the show after the first episode, but showed up back up in the loft during season three).

It turned out that there was a lot to love about New Girl, from how they played with the bubbly Deschanel’s public persona to personally feeling represented whenever Max Greenfield’s Schmidt had to explain Jewish culture to his gentile friends. But the more I watched, it dawned on me that I’d never seen a show that treated the weirdness of male friendship so well. Technically, New Girl was a show about a couple of guys and a woman living together. Practically, it was a show about a group of men around my age committed to and growing within substantive and intimate friendships.

Which shouldn’t sound so wild, except that it kind of was. There’s this idea that once you hit your 30s you have a difficult time making friends. It’s been studied: not only do people have a more difficult time making friends as they hit their third decade of life, but interactions between friends also decline as we age. And men, traditionally, have a harder time making or keeping friendships. As an extreme extrovert and also a man, these things all sound about right.

New Girl got all this. The real theme of creator Elizabeth Meriwether’s show often seemed to be men living with and cleaning up their own messiness. It was about how it’s never too late for a coming-of-age story.

There are plenty of examples throughout the series. All of the men suffer from being raised or abandoned by bad fathers. Jake Johnson’s Nick drinks too much; Schmidt is a sex-crazed ex-fat kid narcissist with OCD; Winston is a naive sweetheart who can’t seem to get his life together; Coach is a big baby. But there’s one episode in particular, the fifth of the second season, “Models,” that explores the guys and their feelings, and the power of deep friendship, better than anything I’ve ever seen on television before or since.

It starts off simple enough. Schmidt walks up to Nick and tells him he got him a cookie. Nick is confused about the gift, and asks if his friend had an extra and decided to give it to him. Schmidt tells him no. “I was thinking about you,” he says. This causes Nick to spiral. He can’t understand how his friend, another man, thinks of him. Thoughtfulness is surveillance—or worse, weakness. Never a gift. Nick tells Schmidt he never thinks of him. Everything becomes awkward. In the B-plot, Jess and Cece, who have been friends since childhood, fight—and then work out their differences by admitting their feelings and fighting about them. Nick, meanwhile, can’t even accept a gift from his friend without it being awkward.

There’s a lot to Nick and Schmidt’s friendship we’re clued into in the episode. They met in college, when Nick was a gentle stoner who wore a hemp necklace and Schmidt was still weird and kind. They became inseparable, and Nick even mentions their approaching 10-year roommate anniversary. Schmidt has too many feelings for Nick, who we find out was really one of Schmidt’s first and only friends. Nick, meanwhile, also has feelings, but he bottles them up until the end of the episode when they come streaming out. It’s perfectly fine for guys to love each other and to admit that, and we watch Nick learn that lesson.The whole thing is sweet catharsis and the best of many examples of guys reckoning the stupid macho ideas that are part of our culture. You might expect that sort of thing more these days, but ten years ago it felt subversive on network television.

As New Girl wound down after seven seasons, I realized that it was probably the last roommate sitcom I’d ever watch in real time as a sort of peer: the show ran through my 30s just as the characters went through theirs. They weren’t kids just starting out, or big sprawling families. Just 30-somethings trying to make it into the next phase of their lives, hopefully a little better and happier. It was the last sitcom I saw where I found myself genuinely relating to the themes being explored. What makes the show special, I think, is also what prevented me from figuring out my personal character astrology chart. After watching it again, ten years on, the only answer I could give was, “I’m all the guys.”