Jess and Nick and Schmidt and Winston used to live together in the same apartment in Los Angeles. Nick (Jake Johnson) and Jess (Zooey Deschanel) decided to start dating but broke up. Then Schmidt (Max Greenfield) married Jess’s best pal, Cece (Hannah Simone), and Nick, who owns a bar, moved to New Orleans to be with his girlfriend. Schmidt and Cece are now basking in the glow of nuptial bliss and thinking about getting out of the old place and buying a house, and it just so happens that Winston, whose girlfriend, Aly (Nasim Pedrad), is on the other side of the country being trained as an FBI agent, has a sister, Leslie (Ayden Mayeri) who is a real-estate agent. Meanwhile, Jess misses Nick, who is also writing a book, and not just in a friendly way. It’s all a bit of a mess.
New Girl (FOX, TV-14) began its sixth season on Tuesday night with an episode directed by Deschanel. The episode opens with Jess indulging herself in woodworking and making protein shakes to distract herself from her feelings for Nick. It ends with the whole gang happily smashing the inside of Schmidt and Cece’s new house to pieces and drinking sparkling wine from red Solo-brand cups. A great many things happen in between.
Nick returns early from New Orleans, which upsets Jess so much that she lies and tells him she has to go meet a friend at the lemur cage in the zoo. Leslie accidentally takes Schmidt and Cece on a tour of a house that is not for sale, whereupon the owner chases them away with a baseball bat, after which her employment is terminated. Winston decides to enlist her to help him find a home of his own because he fears offending Aly. Leslie locates a houseboat, which Winston declines to purchase. Jess interrupts Schmidt and Cece’s meeting with a loan officer to confess her rekindled feelings for Nick, who shows up out of the blue to cosign their loan. He tells Jess that he has finished his book after writing "2000 pages per day by hand," a very fast pace indeed, and would like to dedicate it to her. During a Skype session Winston tells Aly that her sister "ain’t very good at her job" and calls her a "cotton head." She agrees.
Characters in this program speak very quickly. They say words like "on fleek" and talk about Googling things. There are jokes about how Schmidt mispronounces coupon as "cup-on" and how in Portland Seattle is referred to as either "North Portland" or "Vancouver’s shoe." This is news to me. Leslie explains that as a Sagittarius she is "really good with horses and people." About half of the gags involve that idea that women—in this case, Jess—behave like ninnies when they are in love with men who are no longer interested in them.
The clothes are interesting. Jess wears a denim romper. Winston spends the entire episode in a green sweater with what look like either bears or dinosaurs on it. A man at the bank wears a very large type of protective glasses called rollups. Cece and Schmidt think he is blind, but really there is just something wrong with his pupils.
One thing confused me. Unless Nick was gone for only three or four days, he must have written the longest book in our language, which is not, I suppose, impossible. Maybe he is lying about his pace. We’ll find out next week.