I Rewatched New Girl As An Adult And Realized That The Show Spent 7 Seasons Selling Us On Marriage

As a fairly sheltered girl who didn’t grow up watching sitcoms, I was scandalized by the profuse references to sex and the characters’ nonchalant attitude about pretty much everything I take seriously. Initially, we only watched a couple episodes a week, but when my best friend and I moved in together after college, we started watching it together in earnest. As we moved through the series, I fell in love with the characters, their growth, and the way the show felt increasingly wholesome as it progressed. 

Fast forward a handful of years, and I'm rewatching New Girl (this time with my husband) and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. The show has a ridiculously high rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and I can see why it’s stood the test of time. New Girl is witty, awkward, and adorable, much like its protagonist, Jessica Day. The show follows Jess, her best friend, and her three male roommates who she lives with in apartment 4D (affectionately known as “The Loft”) through their late twenties to their mid-late thirties. The show centers heavily on themes of friendship and love. While New Girl resists showing any explicit material, there is a lot of crude talk about intimacy, and many scenes are cut before and after implied sex. But as I watch through the show a second time, I've been struck less by the flagrantly secular sexual ethic of the characters and more by how deeply they crave stable, faithful love. 

Every road in New Girl, no matter how chaotic, leads back to commitment.

Even though many of the characters act blasé about their romantic flings, the frequent admissions of longing for love and connection have caught my attention. Throughout the show, various characters insist they want to be able to have meaningless sex, while Jess is self-conscious about always feeling a deep connection to anyone she sleeps with. Yet when the characters do have casual sex, the encounters are portrayed as vapid and disappointing, even when they convince themselves in the moment that they're living life to the fullest. The show is making its case from the very beginning: casual sex doesn't deliver, and the characters know it, even when they pretend not to. It often takes a while for the lesson to fully land, but it always lands. Schmidt, for example, realizes he loves Cece after an awkward and emotionless liaison with his boss, who doesn't want to keep sleeping with him because she desires a real connection. Even that realization doesn't stop Schmidt from making many more foolish decisions before he eventually settles down and builds a life with Cece, but the trajectory is clear. Every road in New Girl, no matter how chaotic, leads back to commitment.

The show could have ended with any of them single and "thriving," or chasing the next fling, yet it doesn't. Every main character lands in a committed relationship, and the show treats that ending as the reward rather than the resignation. Cece and Schmidt, arguably the two most licentious main characters, are the first to choose marriage, which feels significant. The show makes a conscious effort to move them out of their initial immaturity and into a strong, loving, and committed marriage. If the writers were trying to convince us that marriage is the goal worth working toward, putting the wildest characters there first is a pretty good way to do it.

Additionally, Jess and Cece worry about their fertility, and when Cece realizes she has a low ovarian reserve, she starts to become serious about settling down and having a family. Even though she and Schmidt don't end up getting married until later in the show, watching Cece's heartbreak over her potential inability to have children is beautiful, especially given the target audience of the show. Cece seems to have it all. She's cool around the guys, she's attractive, confident, and an "it" girl by all appearances. This flies in the face of a cultural narrative that tells women they can have it all with no limits. Cece is forced to reckon with her humanity, and the sensitive way the show handles her internal struggle is actually quite moving. By taking infertility seriously, the show implicitly takes motherhood seriously too. The audience is meant to feel her grief, which means the audience is meant to understand that family is something worth grieving over.

New Girl also deals with themes of family trauma, and importantly, the show takes those wounds seriously. All of the main characters come from homes that are broken in some way. Jess and Schmidt are children of divorce, and we see them overcompensating in various unhealthy ways. Jess tries desperately to reunite her parents, even decades after they have divorced. Even though her scheming is portrayed as comedic, it's ultimately devastating to watch her brokenness over the fracture in her family. Schmidt's lonely childhood is perhaps even more pitiable. Much of Schmidt's ridiculous obsession with his physique and sexual prowess is downstream from the fact that he had an unhealthy relationship with food through most of his childhood and college years. Once he rebrands himself as hot and successful, he's still Schmidt, desperately needing to be liked by everyone.

New Girl pulls no punches when it comes to the deep trauma left by irresponsible, absent, or selfish parents.

But divorce is not the only dynamic explored here. Winston's father abandoned their family when he was young, Cece's dad died when she was in elementary school, and Nick's parents were together, but his father was a fraudulent businessman and Nick was often left shouldering the family burdens and responsibilities. These childhood wounds (particularly father wounds) follow the characters far into their adult lives and are explored many times on the show. New Girl pulls no punches when it comes to the deep trauma left by irresponsible, absent, or selfish parents. The show's argument is hard to miss when you're paying attention. Broken families create broken adults, and the only way through is to build something better than what you came from. For these characters, building something better looks like marriage and a family of their own.

Infidelity is another area where New Girl minces no words. Cheating is portrayed as weak, unattractive, and deplorable. Cheaters are seen as selfish and morally deficient. Instead of glorifying infidelity in the name of love, New Girl applauds honesty in relationships and ultimately condemns unfaithfulness. This is a refreshing change from the endless media that codes cheating as an exciting, even enviable experience, so long as it brings a happily ever after. In real life, unfaithfulness is ugly and rarely ends well. In this regard, New Girl is refreshing in its attitude towards loyalty and love. The show takes the position that the marriages it has worked so hard to build are worth protecting, and that anyone who would damage one is not the hero of the story.

Beyond romance, the show is famous for its portrayal of deep friendships. The characters form lasting relationships and support one another through joy and sorrow. They often hold each other to a higher standard (or sometimes choose to join in the trouble), encourage one another to be brave, and remind one another of their worth. Friendship is central to New Girl, and arguably, the successful romances in the show are formed out of deep friendships. The romances that last are the ones built on years of knowing each other, watching each other fail, and choosing each other anyway. The show seems to argue that this is the foundation worth building a marriage on.

Ironically, New Girl ultimately undermines the modern sexual ethic it portrays. Instead of a cynical approach to love, we see it depicted as the ultimate dream come true for those lucky enough to find and protect it. New Girl is worth the watch, and even if you (like me) cringe your way through some of the dialogue, our culture could learn lessons about friendship, faithfulness, and love from those 2012 dreamers living in 4D. They spent seven seasons making the case that real love, real family, and real commitment are worth showing up for. Two decades into the era of swipe culture and casual everything, that case feels more radical than ever.