New Girl - "Chicago" - Review

The best television comedies have a zany spark. This inspired energy they exude. An unpinnable je nais se quoi that makes them a pleasure to watch. It’s that quality they give off when the writing, the acting, and the production design culminate in a finished product that’s simply a pleasure to watch.

Even when New Girl isn’t making me laugh (and this episode wasn't its funniest), it leaves me smiling, self-satisfied at watching a show that’s in its prime; that’s new, exciting, and immensely fun. New Girl doesn’t always re-invent the wheel. In fact, it’s often very formulaic. Its bigger arcs for this season are relationship narratives we’ve seen time and again on sitcoms. And yet those stories remain a delight to watch because it’s all so fresh, charming, and, yes, funny.

The moments that sell this inexplicable joyousness to a good series is captured, for me, best in “Chicago” by Jess’s Elvis impersonator performance. Not only does it come totally out of left field but it’s also hilarious and it provides the episode’s biggest laugh. And yet it’s heartwarming, goofy, and lovable and completely in the vein of jokes that New Girl is known for. The second best example of this style of joke-telling comes early in the episode. In a moment that’s equally funny and sad, Nick tells his roommates that his dad has died just at the moment that they’re sucking in helium from balloons, and thus they are forced to provide sympathy while sounding like munchkins from the Wizard of Oz. 

This balance between humorous and sad continues throughout the episode and is handled incredibly well. Funeral episodes are often about characters taking stock of their lives. Death forces us to consider where we are at with our lives. New Girl does this largely with two of its characters.

In the less serious storyline, Schmidt is being very Schmidt-like. He, of course, makes the funeral for Nick’s recently deceased father all about himself. We don’t learn anything new about Schmidt from this story, but Max Greenfield continues to nail Schmidt’s bizarre enthusiastic, neurotic commitment to everything he does. In this case, Schmidt is scared of death almost to a fault, and he’s afraid to see Mr. Miller’s corpse. This leads to the first very amusing Schmidt scene. Winston coaches him through his fears by pretending to be a dead body, a method that’s working up until the moment Winston shifts out of his coffin pose and freaks Schmidt out. In the second of Schmidt’s thanatophobia scenes, Schmidt protects the chain on Dennis Farina’s corpse from one of Nick’s family members (played by Bill Burr – who some might remember for his memorable cameos in Breaking Bad). The kicker where he finally overcomes his fears and then continually bobs his head into the coffin like a drinking bird toy is a very funny capper. 

The largest chunk of screentime though is dedicated to Nick reacting to the news that his father has passed. We learn the odd, amusing fact that when Nick’s dad left town, he was forced to pick up the slack and take responsibility for his family. “Don’t laugh when they call him responsible,” Schmidt quips. Nick immerses himself in the plans for the funeral, becoming more responsible than perhaps we’ve ever seen him. The big task, the one he’s hesitant about, is giving a eulogy, at the behest of his family. He assigns the writing of the speech to Jess, who not unexpectedly fails at this task. This causes Nick to spiral, getting super drunk just before the funeral. Jess helps sober him up just in time to make the eulogy, a moving, funny, honest speech that is one of the episode’s highlights. 

In the early days, New Girl would never been capable of the delicate balance between sentiment and jokes. But now it does it as effortlessly as an impromptu Elvis karaoke sing-a-long. 

Stray Observations:

-The casting for Nick’s family was epic. Nick Kroll, Margo Martindale, Bill Burr. Doesn’t get much more perfect, and the little details of this worked so well (Grandma: “Don’t trust the cops”). Those Chicago accents were just on the right side of exaggerated.
-Lamorne Morris is very funny in the scene where Winston's attempts to stall the funeral fail when his feelings for his father figure overcome him.
-Though the death of this character comes out of nowhere, and it is a secondary character, the show sold it to me.

-“He loved me more than he loved you” “Yea, he told me that too”

-“Except for that 1 hour I committed fraud with him” “That’s all you need to know”

-“It’s bad to see a body before a funeral”

-“You’re mad at me. You’ve got your mad face”

-“This is every day in North Korea”

-“I really feel transported to the ghetto”

Grade: A-