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In the simplest terms, New Girl is Friends's teenage daughter. The Fox's Zooey Deschanel vehicle has picked up the mannerisms of Friends but isn't a carbon copy. Both shows are hits that started trends. Both shows spawned copy cats, i.e. Will and Grace and The Mindy Project. And both shows made individual stars out of their casts.
While it's too early to tell whether New Girl, which kicks off season thre tonight, will have as legendary a run as Friends, it's got everything going for it—plus a boisterous social media fanbase—that promises the sitcom will be as revered as its predecessor. At least, if New Girl keeps doing everything the former show did right. Here are all the ways New Girl is the next Friends.
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Zooey Deschanel and Jennifer Aniston both became trendsetters.
Google "The Rachel" and you'll get a slew of pictures of Jennifer Aniston with the hairstyle above. She was the model for a new kind of woman in the '90s, sophisticated, fun, and chic. As for Zooey Deschanel, just search "adorkable." Deschanel, as Jess, in her bouncy skirts, brunette bangs, and with her quirky space-cadet persona, has become the poster girl for all things cutesy-hipster.
Schmidt is the male equivalent of Monica Gellar.
Say hello to your resident joyfully overweight college BFFs turned sleek and slender OCD-ridden city dwellers. New Girl rips a page directly out of the Friends playbook by making the motivation for its most outwardly put-together character Schmidt (Max Greenfield)—financially independent and overachieving—also the one who is haunted by an awkward past in which he struggled to lose his virginity and suffered as the butt of all of his friends' jokes. Look at Schmidt and Monica (Courtney Cox) now, in all their attractive glory, and they're the ones with the most to gain at high school reunions.
Winston is the odd man out, i.e. the Phoebe.
Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) and Winston (Lamorne Morris), the extra characters producers don't know what to do with. At least, not in the first seasons. Phoebe, in all her hippie glory, was the extra punchline to every joke. In the first couple seasons, she was the one with the evil twin and the mother who committed suicide and the "Smelly Cat" song that every Central Perk patron loved to hate. That is, until she evolved into a character we cared about—remember her pregnancy with her brother's triplets?!—in the second half of the series.
Winston is in the same kind of limbo. He's a former European basketball star who can't hold an office job and ends up babysitting a kid at one point and having a talent for bells. Yeah, bells. Sure, he's had one relationship, a fickle plot point easily forgotten, but at this point in the series, he wavers between being weird as hell to the sobering voice of reason. Here's to hoping they'll find him a storyline that sticks that gives viewers a sense of who the character actually is.
Nick and Jess are the new Ross and Rachel.
One glimpse of Nick (Jake Johnson) and Jess together and it becomes obvious: they're on the path of Ross (David Schwimmer) and Rachel. Ross and Rachel became a legendary TV couple because they were the perfect romcom fantasy. Ross was a loser who grew up loving Rachel, while Rachel was the woman too blind to see what was right in front her. The series would continually tease the couple. Throughout the run of the show, they were on-again, off-again, but audiences were instantly hooked on the idea that they were soulmates.
On New Girl, Jess is the optimist to Nick's law school drop-out cynic. She's the one who busts his balls and unwittingly makes him realize his potential. But despite being opposites, their chemistry is undeniable, and their back-and-forth playground banter makes you root for them even more.
Cece and Jess are the new Rachel and Monica.
Like Rachel and Monica, Cece (Hannah Simone) and Jess are polar opposite BFFs whose friendship can only be explained by the fact that they've known each other since they were kids. Cece, a professional model, is the Rachel in this case. She's the more attractive, sexually experienced character, pitted against the sitcom's Monica, Jess, who is squirmy, nerdy, and late to puberty.
However, Cece and Jess aren't carbon copies of the Friends women. Cece grows up to be the more mature voice of reason to Jess' spaced-out self, unlike Rachel and Monica's eventual dynamic.
The guys have been friends for years.
Directly copying the Friends formula, the guys go way back. New Girl's Nick and Winston were best friends growing up, before Nick become college roommates with Schmidt. On Friends, Chandler and Ross were college university BFFs, before Chandler met Joey during a roommate search before the start of the series.
Dermot Mulroney played a love interest on both shows.
This is just a fun coincidence, but still worth pointing out. Dermot Mulroney plays the salt-and-pepper-haired successful business man who romances both of the leading characters of the show.
In the ninth season of Friends, Mulroney plays Gavin, Rachel's coworker at Ralph Lauren, who turns out to be an asshole with a heart of gold, charming Rachel and pissing off Ross. About 10 years later, Mulroney is irking Nick as Jess's suave older man Russell, known by the gang as the Fancyman, who's a parent of one of her students. It helps that Mulroney doesn't look like he's aged a day since 2003.
They live in an unrealistically swanky apartment.
Really though, look at these places. The gang of New Girl live in a loft in the heart of Los Angeles, while the Friends cast are right in Greenwich Village. Let's look at where they stand monetarily. Each character on Friends struggles with maintaining jobs throughout the series, a problem that's remedied in the series finale, when Chandler thanks rent control for allowing them to live in the area.
On New Girl, Nick works at a bar, Winston has just started a radio station gig, and Jess is an out-of-work teacher. The only viable explanation for them living like socialites is that Schmidt, the resident rich kid, is paying more than half of the entire rent. Sure.
