New Girl: Menzies

     In all fairness to How I Met Your Mother, I can't review this week's New Girl without talking about hackneyed sitcom plots.  I don't want it to appear like I am being overly critical of HIMYM, which I blasted this week for using a bunch of standard comedy situations in a horribly unfunny episode, while giving the new kid on the block a pass.  There isn't a more hack sitcom episode then the PMS one and New Girl went there this week.  Was it inevitable for a show with the set up of one girl living with three guys?  Maybe.  But it seems so easy and obvious and I thought New Girl and its writers were above easy and obvious.  I guess no matter how original and fresh your joke writing may be, those old crutches are hard to not fall back on.
     Where New Girl differs from HIMYM is that Menzies was hilarious outside of the shows overdone main premise.  Even though the main story line is Jess not wanting to look for a job and blaming it on PMS, this was a Schmidt episode.  The genius of a well done ensemble comedy is you only need one character to carry an episode and if that ensemble is firing on all cylinders they will switch off who that character is.  Schmidt did most of the carrying in this episode and turned what could have been a horrible half hour into a laugh riot.  With lines like "you're irrationally angry 365 days a year," when talking to Nick or "there's a fine line between sexual harassment and something awesome" when talking about his bosses passes at him or "we sold our qualms.  We used the profits to buy perfect bodies" when talking about his sex appeal, he had me laughing until I fell off the couch.  And that's not even mentioning his attempts to collect money for the bills.
     I don't want to leave Nick out of the conversation.  Even with Schmidt carrying the heaviest load, Nick had plenty of great moments trying to deal with his anger.  Scenes of him trying to force a pull door open by pushing or being pulled around a whirlpool by an old Asian man may have been odd but I was in stitches.
     The moral of the story... you can get away with a hackneyed premise if you write funny jokes.  Did you hear that HIMYM writers?  You have to write funny jokes to make people laugh!

     Nick quote of the week, "I can't keep thinking of you as my magical friend with no name."