New Girl’ and ‘The Mindy Project’; Week 1, Post 3: “Party Girl vs. Rom-Com Girl”

That’s the trouble: if you have a proclivity toward selectively seeing sameness and ignoring difference, you’re missing the stuff that makes characters and comedy great. Harder to do this with television than movies, partly because television allows those “slight” differences we keep missing in film to be magnified into visible distinctions by virtue of sheer hours of exposure.

Fixing this bad habit, this blindness to variety, requires that we, as an audience, be re-trained.

New Girl more or less announces in the title that this is what it’s trying to do with the “____ Girl” trope. It’s insisting on the possibility of a new girl, and chooses for that “new girl” one of the most typecast film actresses of our time. Not just typecast —archetypecast. The opening sequence shows the archetype’s bright shiny frame quite literally, then shows it collapse as all the characters walk away from it. By showing us Deschanel next to Lizzy Caplan, by showing us Deschanel next to Parker Posey, we’re slowly being trained to see difference precisely where we’re tempted to generalize most. It’s like we’re learning that there are more colors than red and blue. If this sometimes feels overly didactic, I think, under the circumstances, that it’s forgivable.

Read the rest here. 

Dear Television is Jane Hu, Lili Loofbourow, and Phillip Maciak. We will be writing epistolary criticism about TV.  If Clarissa Harlowe were writing about Girls — and she kind of is, isn’t she? — this is what that would be like. Abridged. This season, we’ll be corresponding about FOX's New Girl and The Mindy Project from our new home at the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

[Photo: Zooey Deschanel]