'New Girl's Going Back But Moving Forward

The morning after a break-up is a horrible, terrible, sad-making time like the one Nick and Jess had in New Girl 's last episode, "Mars Landing." And it's only made more difficult when the person you love — the person you just broke up with — is still physically located approximately 20 feet from you. And it's only made even more difficult when you live in a sitcom and can't tell the other people physically located very close to you that something rough just went down between you and this other person that you'd like to talk about. Hijinks might even ensue!

Characters who bottle up of their emotions about big life changes are a sitcom staple; this sort of suppression leads to misunderstandings (i.e. Schmidt momentarily thinking Jess might be pregnant because she's hiding things). And, for New Girl, it functions as a way to get this team back together, a somewhat unexpected outcome considering it was all started with a break-up.

Once Jess and Nick start bottling up their emotions, the rest of the gang follow suit, and everything builds to Winston's Big Moment, which, of course, turns into Nick and Jess' Big Moment. If every episode of a modern sitcom can be traced back to Friends , "Big News" might be a New Girlian take on that episode of Friends where the gang tries to hide the fact that they know about Monica and Chandler's relationship while simultaneously trying to manipulate the information out of the couple. That episode is a high point of Friends and, similarly, "Big News" is a highlight of New Girl's third season.

Because New Girl has always been a show with weird tangents, but, mostly, a lot of heart. This episode manipulated that heart to fit pretty damn well into those weird tangents, moving forward while paying homage to the show's break-up origins.

So, yes, Jess is back crying on that couch in her flannel after a devastating break-up, watching Dirty Dancing. But this time it's somehow... better?

Image: Fox