Jenn's Pick: Top 5 Episodes of Season Two's "New Girl"

A lot of television series struggle to find their footing during their second seasons. The term “sophomore slump” is tossed around quite frequently, and I think that the reason is due to this: it is very easy to launch yourself – your characters, your stories, your sets – head-first into an adventure. That’s what first seasons truly are, if we’re being honest. They’re adventures, they’re explorations, and they’re meant to be that way. We, as audience members, need to be invested within a few episodes of a series, or else we will move on and find something else that will capture our interest. (Chalk it up to our short attention spans.)

So what tends to happen, in my experience as a television viewer, is that series try so hard to pull out all their stops during their first season: they want to make us invested in these characters and their lives so they throw hijinks and shenanigans and drama at the viewers. But many shows nosedive during their second seasons because they simply try too hard and have no idea how to progress, naturally, from the place where they ended their first season. The series becomes more and more about pleasing the audience rather than investing in characters (i.e. why Glee became so erratic as a show, and why the first few episodes of the second season of Community were shaky, in my opinion). The very viewers that the show tried so hard to please during the first season bolt at the uneven writing and/or acting in the second season.

“See Ya” is one of my favorite episodes of New Girl’s freshman year, and it is also the series’ first finale episode. The reason that I loved this episode so much was partially due to the amazing writing and acting, but truly rooted in the not-so-finale vibe that it provided. It ended happily – Nick returned to the loft and the characters had dance parties alone in their respective rooms. It didn’t feel like an ending, really, but a beginning.

I don’t mean to presume that series shouldn’t end on cliffhangers – the first season of Community did, and it was one of those moments where you suck in a breath and don’t exhale until the credits begin to roll. It was THAT good. But what I admired about the first season of New Girl and what I also admire about its second season is that the show doesn’t slam on the brakes at the end of a season and then rev the engine during the premiere of the following season. The transitions are smooth – “See Ya” and “Elaine’s Big Day” both had endings that felt rather organic. But perhaps that’s because they weren’t actually endings at all, but beginnings. These characters have new chances, new choices, and new adventures each day. I think that sometimes television series forget that.

Nevertheless, New Girl technically has ended until September (unless you join in on our #SummerRewatch this summer!), which means that it is time for me to reflect on five of my absolute favorite episodes this season (okay, six, because I am a cop-out). Its sophomore year has been so consistent, hilarious, and heartfelt that it doesn’t resemble anything close to that “sophomore slump” other shows encounter. I feel that this series has managed to avoid that pitfall by focusing more on developing their characters than catering to the audience whims. And that? Well, that combined with the talented writing, brilliant producing, and exceptional acting made this season of New Girl one of the best.

Ready to see which episodes ranked as my favorites? Grab some popcorn and put on your yellow tracksuit, because here are my top five episodes of this season!

(In Which I Discuss My Internal Struggle in the Wake of #RenewCommunity)

While everyone else was adding “Renew Community” to their avatars over the last few weeks, I was sitting – quietly – and contemplating whether or not I actually wanted to see my beloved show return to television for a fifth season after all. In order to avoid being tarred and feathered, of course, I kept this to myself and smiled when I heard the news of Community’s renewal, mainly because I knew how hard everyone else had fought to save the show. They were happy, therefore I was happy.

Honestly, the fourth season of Community has been… well, rocky. And I don’t necessarily attribute that to the obvious lack of Dan Harmon. I really do believe that the show could have been great this year without him. Yes, it would not have been the SAME show, but it could have been GREAT no less. However, looking back over this season I realize that my feelings toward it can be summed up in one word: lukewarm.

Here’s the thing about the term “lukewarm”: it’s completely fine to be lukewarm toward episodes in a series. There are episodes that I feel lukewarm toward in Doctor Who, in Community, and in New Girl alike. But – and this is a BIG but – when your feelings toward an entire season of a series can only be categorized as such, you place yourself into rather dangerous territory. A season becomes forgettable and lost in the shuffle. And the one thing that I never wanted Community to become was a series like Scrubs or The Office or How I Met Your Mother. All three are arguably amazing sitcoms and I have seen each one of them. However, I often hear this in regards to them: “[insert show here] is SO good. You definitely need to watch! But just pretend season(s) [enter disappointing season or seasons here] doesn't/don’t exist.”

Whenever friends recommend shows to me, occasionally I will hear that line – because the fact is that certain sitcoms just go through seasons where their show declines so far in quality that it becomes un-recommendable. I never wanted Community to be categorized in that way, but now – I fear – it is. “Community is SO good! Just… pretend season four doesn’t exist.” And the painful reality is that the fourth season of Community didn’t HAVE to be that way – this was preventable.

So… where do we go from here? What can we learn from the pitfalls of the fourth season that can actually allow us (I keep using the first-person possessive, when I really mean “the people who make this series”) to rise from the ashes, as it were? Here are a few things I believe must fundamentally occur in order for the fifth season of Community to be smart, successful, and stable.

4x13 "Advanced Introduction to Finality" (I Don't Wanna See You Go But It's Not Forever)

"Advanced Introduction to Finality"

Original Airdate: May 9, 2013

No matter how prepared you think you are to say goodbye, I would argue that you can never be truly ready. Even if you are anticipating change in life, saying farewell to current comfort, current stability, or familiarity is intimidating at best and downright paralyzing at worst. When I was a junior in college (what feels like eons ago, but was only, in actuality, four years ago), I transferred from a college I had been attending in West Palm Beach back home to Orlando. Since I was a poor college student who had been attending a private school and The University of Central Florida was a fifteen minute commute, I moved home. And that is where I have been since, slowly saving up money to move out on my own. In less than a month, I’ll be moving across town to live with my friend Leah. And it’s going to be a great opportunity. I love my family, but I’m ready to live on my own. Still, saying goodbye – even when I am only twenty minutes from them – to my family is going to be strange. It’s a weird shift in dynamic and no matter how much you prepare yourself for it, inevitably a part of you mourns what once was and is scared of what’s to come. These days, my co-workers and I like to lament our college days. We miss being able to sleep in, make our own class schedules, and discuss literature. At the time of graduation, we were more than ready to bid our university farewell – we couldn’t WAIT to exist in a world where we didn’t have to take finals or write papers anymore. So… what happened between then and now? Why was it so easy to say goodbye then, but so hard in hindsight? Maybe Jeff Winger could answer this for us, because it’s this very dichotomy – the exhilaration of a new adventure and fear of the unknown – that grips him throughout “Advanced Introduction to Finality.”

4x12 "Heroic Origins" (You Can't Escape Destiny; She Comes For Us All)

"Heroic Origins"

Original Airdate: May 2, 2013

There’s a line, first famously sung in A Very Potter Musical that I absolutely love. It’s in the song that opens the musical, where all the main characters are returning to Hogwarts to begin another school year. They sang that they were going “back to the place where our story begins.” I think the reason that I’ve always loved that particular part of the song is because it really exemplifies what Hogwarts is to these students: it’s home. It’s the place where all of their stories started – where Ron and Hermione became friends and then fell in love; where Harry realized who he was as a person and who his family was; where Neville’s story of heroism began. It’s there that everything starts, both in the StarKid musical and in the Harry Potter franchise. And it’s there that it ends. I’ve, personally, always held fast to the idea that everything happens for a reason. There are no coincidences in life. Call it fate or destiny or a divine intervention, but I’m convinced that our lives are definitely woven with the lives of other people for some sort of reason or purpose. And we can play around with this notion a lot by contemplating how our lives could have been, for better or for worse. What if I had been at that intersection a moment earlier? What if I had chosen to sit in the front of the class instead of the back? What if I had joined that club or been at that meeting or gone to that movie? Moreover, what if I HADN’T done certain things, gone certain places? I think about this sometimes when I reflect on spending the first thirteen years of my life living in Pennsylvania. My parents wanted to move to Florida and I was vehemently against it. I had friends up north, I reasoned. GOOD friends. But what if I hadn’t moved to Florida? What if my parents had never desired to live somewhere else? I would have never gone to school here, never met my best friends, never been a part of so many things that made my life what it is today. It’s the what-ifs in life that sometimes paralyze us. It’s also the what-ifs that define who we have become. The study group contemplates their own individual journeys this week and reflects on how those journeys converged with the journeys of others in order to form – what Abed deems – “a crazy quilt of destiny.” Every choice in life we make has a consequence, he essentially states. We choose to turn left instead of right, and our entire lives are reconstructed around that decision. We change the game with just one simple decision. And we change our lives, as well.

4x11 "Basic Human Anatomy" (The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side. Until It's Not.)

"Basic Human Anatomy"

Original Airdate: April 25, 2013

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if you could switch places with someone for just a day? I think, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we all have longed to swap lives with someone else. But here’s the funny thing about desiring to live another life – we never do it when we’re content in our own lives. The reason, of course, that we dream about what it would be like to live in someone else’s shoes is because we’re prone to a “grass is greener on the other side” mentality. When we lament the way that our lives turned out – our lack of jobs, fortune, romance, functional families, friends, etc. – we tend to covet the lives of people we feel are better off in those areas than we are. We long after a life that wasn’t ours to have, while those individuals are (likely) longing for lives that they don’t have as well. It’s a viciously ironic cycle, this coveting of someone else’s days. But we like to play pretend. When we’re kids, we play “house,” and use plastic swords to ward off invisible monsters. Because the truth is that we’re all dreamers, in some fashion, and reality… well, reality often squelches those dreams pretty quickly. So what does “Basic Human Anatomy” have to do with this notion of living vicariously through someone else? If you watched the episode, you’ll know that it has nearly everything to do with this idea. Troy cannot bear to face a conversation that he needs to have with Britta. The solution, for him, is the adult version of “playing pretend” (or, well, maybe not the adult version) by reenacting a body swapping movie with Abed. And at the end of the episode, no matter how painful the process, Troy has a second “Mixology Certification” moment of growth. And it’s pretty beautiful to behold, regardless of the bumps that were encountered along the way.

4x10 "Intro to Knots" (The Empire Strikes Back)

"Intro to Knots"

Original Airdate: April 18, 2013

War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. (Okay, look, I promise not to copy and paste the lyrics to “War” as the blog-review this week. Though, I admit that I was tempted to just to see how everyone would respond.) War is painful and it’s damaging. It’s something that we’d all rather brush under the rugs of our daily lives and pretend doesn’t exist. And truly, unless we have immediate family members, close friends, or other loved ones serving in the military, too often we find ourselves taking for granted the fact that so many people fight for us on a daily basis. I never really understood war, but I know that it’s woven into the fabric of our history. I remember studying battles in high school, learning about leaders and armies and tactics. I had the amazing opportunity to visit Rome this past summer and visited Julius Caesar’s grave, as well as the Roman Ruins. I stood in the place where great leaders delivered their nations through wars, where mighty empires like Rome rose and fell. So this episode of Community centered around the idea of an empire – the study group. In the past, I’ve discussed the significance of Megan Ganz’s first episode, “Cooperative Calligraphy.” In my review of it, I noted that it was at the end of this episode that the study group began to function as one unit. Rather than seven individual members, the Greendale Seven became one entity with one purpose: protect the group from outsiders, from anyone seeking to destroy it.

The group’s collective mentality has been both a blessing and a curse, as we’ve seen in this season’s episodes (most notably “Alternative History of the German Invasion”). Sure, the study group has survived paintball wars together, insane teachers, and Chang. They love each other. They spend, presumably, the majority of their time together. They always want to look out for the best interests of the group as a whole. But what happens when an entity is challenged by an outsider who discovers a crack in the armor of the group? What happens when stakes are raised for an empire? Because I do believe that the reason this episode was so tense (and by that, I do mean that it was brilliant in the sense that you could tangibly feel high stakes) was because it was supposed to be: there is more at stake this year for the Greendale Seven than there ever has been. Many of the group members are on the cusp of graduation. With that, however, comes a price: individuality begins to become a dominating force. Empires fall when the goals and desires of the individuals outweigh the goals and desires of the group at large. Nothing divides the study group faster, we see, than the issue of graduation. Watch “Cooperative Calligraphy,” however, because I do believe that the study group emerges victorious because they have learned from their failures. They realize that it is difficult to face an external enemy, but the TRUE enemy is the dissention they create amongst each other. THAT is the most destructive force of all. And it’s something that Cornwallis attempts to mine (and nearly does) throughout the episode.

4x09 "Intro to Felt Surrogacy" (Secrets Don't Make Friends)

"Intro to Felt Surrogacy"

Original Airdate: April 11, 2013

I’ve heard the adage “secrets don’t make friends” numerous times throughout my life, but never really paused enough to dwell on the meaning until recently. I have to argue that secrets, in the girl-world, DO make friends. The person who holds the secrets within a group of girlfriends is the most coveted person. She’s the one who has all the knowledge and all the gossip, which makes her the person everyone listens to. Once she loses that power – once someone else divulges a secret or piece of gossip – she isn’t as valued, and the balance of power shifts to the person with the newest, juiciest tidbits of information. Secrets may make friends in girl-world, but only if they’re the secrets of the others – the outsiders, the people apart from the group. Once a secret within a group is unearthed, however, the adage becomes active again. Secrets destroy intra-group relationships fairly quickly. And “Intro to Felt Surrogacy” is an episode that exemplifies this quite clearly. In it, we hear a seemingly innocent story from the group about a hot air balloon ride and (an inadvertent) trip into the woods. It’s not until later on in the episode that we realize the reason why the study group has been so awkward around one another. They each divulged a deep, dark secret in those woods.

But no one remembers a thing.