by Joy Press
Although she had become an idol to brainy, wisecracking young women all over America, Liz Lemon provoked soul-searching in the real blogosphere. After all, her character flaws sometimes corresponded closely to sexist clichés, such as the way she was tortured by her ticking biological clock. Liz was mentored by the paternalistic Jack Donaghy and surrounded herself almost exclusively with men. In fact, her “Girlie” show had very few women writers, and they never uttered a word. In a much-circulated post on her blog Tiger Beatdown, writer Sady Doyle critiqued “Liz Lemonism” as a kind of privileged “semi-feminism”: she represents someone “content with a feminist movement dedicated to the advancement not necessarily of women, but of one particular woman, the Liz Lemonist in question, and perhaps a handful of the friends who agree with her most often.”
Yet that critique was already embedded in 30 Rock. In fact, it’s not an accident that Liz is a privileged, mildly racist corporate sellout of a semifeminist who is privately addicted to bad reality TV even as she publicly spouts political pieties. Indeed, the writers exploit the comic potential of her hypocrisy at every opportunity. TV industry sexism made for a bittersweet running joke, too: the de-girlification of Liz’s The Girlie Show begins with the hiring of Tracy Jordan and ends, in the final season, with the series being revamped into a frat-boy spectacle called Bro Body Douche Presents the Man Cave. Its tagline? “TV for Your Peen.”
Fey thrived as a woman in comedy who could hang with the boys, but she was increasingly wrapping her caustic wit around Hollywood gender inequity. “I have a suspicion—and hear me out, because this is a rough one—that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore,” she chided in a 2011 New Yorker essay, “Confessions of a Working Mother.” Her solution was simple: women in power need to hire more women. “That is why I feel obligated to stay in the business and try hard to get to a place where I can create opportunities for others, and that’s why I can’t possibly take time off for a second baby, unless I do, in which case that is nobody’s business and I’ll never regret it for a moment unless it ruins my life.” Fey’s second baby was born later that year; it didn’t ruin her life, as far as I can tell. And she continued to hire and mentor talented women directors and writers on 30 Rock, including Tami Sagher, Nina Pedrad, and Lang Fisher.
Although 30 Rock won 16 Emmy Awards (and 103 nominations) over the course of its run, its ratings never rallied. If NBC hadn’t been doing so poorly with its overall schedule, the series probably would’ve been canceled sooner. As the show rolled toward its seventh and final season, Fey began imagining where she wanted these characters to end up. Liz Lemon’s unmarried, child-free state had been a sweet spot for comedy—and also for pathos. Kay Cannon felt one of her key roles in the writers’ room was to inject emotion into an otherwise gag-heavy show. “Liz Lemon, you cared who she fell in love with. You cared if she was going to be able to have it all, and what that meant for her.”
Forty-something Liz had started to settle down with a younger, unemployed guy named Criss Cros (James Marsden). In a season-six episode called “Murphy Brown Lied to Us,” she admits to him that she’s contemplated adoption but decided against it after passing a panicked mom in the office hallway trying to get a work project done. She realizes that the eighties TV icon is just a product of feminist wishful thinking. “Murphy Brown had the whole FYI gang in her corner,” Liz tells Criss. “Jim Dial, Frank Fontana, Corky, even Miles, in his own way”—they communally helped working mom Murphy raise her baby.
At the start of season seven, however, Fey told the writers’ room she wanted Liz to adopt kids. The idea was to let her embrace some of those traditional adult milestones, she told a reporter, “but without romanticizing them” or losing “who she has been this whole time.”
One of Liz’s final scenes was set at a strip club, a nod to the pilot episode, where Tracy and Liz originally made a pact to work together on TGS “to break the shackles of the white dudes who want to see us fail.” Beth McCarthy-Miller, who directed the final episodes of the series, recalls how hard it was to keep the jokes snapping when everyone was feeling so raw. “We were in this strip club, and it was very personal and heartfelt. Tina started crying, Tracy started crying, and then literally the whole Video Village started crying,” says McCarthy-Miller fondly. “I don’t think anyone was kidding themselves that these weren’t the best scripts they would ever have in their lives.”
After the writers’ room shuttered, its occupants scattered to the four corners of TV Land. Dave Finkel, Brett Baer, Kay Cannon, and Nina Pedrad soon reunited on New Girl, while Jack Burditt, Tracey Wigfield, and Lang Fisher later found themselves collaborating on another single-woman sitcom, The Mindy Project.
When 30 Rock began, Tina Fey had a unique position in the television landscape: a female showrunner entrusted by a broadcast network to create and star in her own loopy prime-time sitcom about a smart, dissatisfied feminist. By the time 30 Rock left the air, what had been a solitary occurrence had virtually become a genre. Single women were everywhere.
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In the fall of 2011, each of the major broadcast networks launched an edgy chick comedy created by a woman. CBS premiered 2 Broke Girls, co-created by Sex and the City’s Michael Patrick King and bawdy comedian Whitney Cummings, who also starred in her own series on NBC, Whitney. ABC introduced Emily Kapnek’s snarky Suburgatory, with Nahnatchka Khan’s Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23 lined up for midseason. Over on Fox, there was Liz Meriwether’s New Girl. Cultural observers spotted a pattern in this sudden spate of fem-centric comedies, but it wasn’t entirely clear why networks were so in sync.
Maybe the trend stemmed from Tina Fey’s success, or from TV executives trying to tap into the young female demographic mobilized by the ladyblogs. Veteran producer Lynda Obst believes the movie industry’s declining interest in character-driven movies and romantic comedies pushed screenwriters to look to television. Or was it the “Bridesmaids Effect”? Written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids puked, farted, and shat its way into movie history upon its release in April 2011. Starring SNL’s Wiig and Maya Rudolph and Gilmore Girls’s Melissa McCarthy, the comedy would gross (gross being the operative word) more than $288 million worldwide. Although most of the 2011 sitcoms were fully formed when the movie hit theaters, it’s likely that Bridesmaids emboldened Hollywood executives to greenlight those series or give them a bigger push.
“There was nothing like [my show] in the air when I wrote it,” Don’t Trust the B— creator Nahnatchka Khan observed. “Now it’s like this Zeitgeist thing!”
Most of these chick comedies capitalized on networks’ increasing openness to vulgarity. New Girl plotted an episode around dating a guy with a micro-penis, and 2 Broke Girls dropped so many casual references to female anatomy that Whitney Cummings would later quip, “Vagina jokes paid for my house.” Within six months, guys were already complaining that the medium had tilted too far toward women’s concerns. “We’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation,” Lee Aronsohn, the co-creator of Two and a Half Men, told the Hollywood Reporter. “Enough, ladies. I get it. You have periods.”
Although New Girl dedicated a whole episode (“Menzies”) to menstruation, mostly it kept female abjection under wraps. Instead, the comedy of New Girl came from the friction of a girlie girl dropped into a bro-lific Boy World. In the pilot, schoolteacher Jessica Day—played by Zooey Deschanel, already identified strongly with the “manic pixie dream girl” archetype—breaks up with her cheating boyfriend and moves into a loft shared by three dudes. As the show develops, gender grows more muddled: Jess becomes one of the guys, without losing her dreaminess; the men let their macho fronts slip and reveal unexpected sweetness, vulnerability, and weirdness.
“I was very focused on shocking people in my twenties; I loved saying the most outrageous thing,” says New Girl creator Liz Meriwether, sitting at a table in her LA office
. Broadcast network constraints forced her to find more original ways to jolt the audience. “There is a limited number of times you can say vagina or penis on network television, so you have to choose those wisely.” She giggles when she says those words, as a teenager might, then continues, “There have been multiple times when those restrictions have resulted in something much funnier.”
Meriwether’s office is tucked into the Fox lot just around the corner from the Simpsons bungalow, which has a giant yellow Homer hand holding a pink donut out front. The New Girl offices look far more generic; they could easily be mistaken for an insurance company or telemarketing firm, but for the New Girl–branded bicycles propped in the hallway, a recent holiday gift to the staff. When Meriwether first pops her head out the door to introduce herself, she looks so disheveled that I momentarily mistake her for an intern. She has just finished shooting the sixth season and has the glassy eyes and rumpled hair of someone popping up for air after a long spell submerged in a project. “I always feel like I am getting the bends, like coming back up from working so hard to normal life, and normal life hits you in the face, and you forgot you were a person in the world,” she says, every syllable shot through with vocal fry and amusement.
Meriwether grew up worshipping Angela Chase in My So-Called Life. A theater nerd during her high school years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she dressed like Claire Danes’s gawky teenage alter ego and honed her salty sense of humor. At Yale, she put it to use writing short plays such as Nicky Goes Goth, starring classmate Zoe Kazan as celebutante Nicky Hilton. After graduation, a New York Fringe Festival production of Nicky Goes Goth caught the attention of an Off-Broadway theater company, which commissioned her to write something even cheekier: Heddatron, a much-lauded futuristic version of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.
By the age of twenty-six, Meriwether had New York theater world cred. But what she really wanted to do was write comedy, and that mission brought her to Los Angeles. A collaboration between the Naked Angels theater company and Fox TV resulted in a Fox deal for a 2006 Meriwether series about four female roommates in New York. She named it Sluts, in keeping with her self-professed love of shock and outrage. “At the time, everybody kept asking, ‘Why are they even shooting this pilot?’ It didn’t feel like a real show to anyone,” she says. Still, the pilot did open the door to other projects. An anti-rom-com called Fuckbuddies eventually morphed into the Ivan Reitman movie No Strings Attached, starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, with Mindy Kaling and Jake Johnson as the lovers’ best friends.
Meanwhile, Meriwether worked on a pitch for another television show. As with Sluts, it would revolve around four friends. But she’d learned from that earlier experience that networks had little interest in series about young female friends. Executives were fixated on attracting a young male audience to make it easier to sell syndication rights later. “That is the business model: if you get men to watch it, you make money,” Meriwether says, shaking her head. “We had meetings where they were telling us we basically had to appeal to men.”
So, this time, she’d make three of the roommates guys. Originally titled Chicks and Dicks, it would soon be renamed New Girl.
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Mindy Kaling once created a classification system to identify female roles in rom-coms. There was the Beautiful Klutz, perfect in every way except that she trips a lot, a minor defect to make her more relatable; the Ethereal Weirdo (aka Manic Pixie Dream Girl), whose sole narrative purpose is to force the male hero to break out of the rut he’s in and start doing wild and crazy things; the Career-Obsessed Woman, who goes around shouting “I don’t have time for this!”; and the Sassy Best Friend, a quirky sidekick who exists only as a foil for the star. Meriwether did not have this essay in mind when she set out to write an entire series consisting only of Sassy Best Friends, but she ultimately took Kaling’s point and ran with it.
Network television has no problem with oddball guys, but Meriwether worried that Fox would strong-arm her into making her heroine less goofy or insist on casting a bombshell. Instead, Fox chairman Kevin Reilly (the exec who had originally championed 30 Rock) told the fledgling showrunner that her job was to ensure that her heroine’s idiosyncratic voice stayed strong.
Jess was initially based heavily on Meriwether herself. Once Zooey Deschanel signed on in early 2011, however, the role evolved into a blend of the two women. Best known as a big-eyed, girlish ingenue from indie films such as 500 Days of Summer, Deschanel was also in a folk-rock duo, She and Him, and had recently created HelloGiggles, an entertainment and lifestyle website for young women. She looked like bluebirds helped her get dressed in the morning, as someone would later taunt her character on New Girl. Although Deschanel didn’t want Jess to serve as the series’ resident buzzkill, reining in the wild boys, she was drawn to Jess’s sexual awkwardness. “Part of the interesting thing about the character, especially in the first season, was that we establish how uncomfortable [the topic of sex] was for her, and a lot of comedy came out of that.”
Deschanel sat in on auditions for all the other lead roles. Max Greenfield was cast as Schmidt, a narcissistic and neurotic jerk whose roommates make him deposit cash in a “douche bag jar” for every idiotic utterance. (Sample: “Guess whose personalized condoms just arrived!”) The role of cranky bartender Nick went to Jake Johnson, and Damon Wayans Jr. played Coach, a former athlete and all-around playa. After shooting the pilot, Wayans had to drop out due to another commitment. Meriwether was forced to create a new male roommate for episode two: Winston Bishop, played by Lamorne Morris, who filled Wayans’s African American actor slot but was a completely different character—an eccentric, gentle guy obsessed with pranks and his cat. For the Bechdel Test, there was Jess’s best friend, Cece (Hannah Simone), an Indian American model who, despite her leading-lady looks, is nearly as silly as Jess.
Since she had little experience as a showrunner, Meriwether was paired with 30 Rock writers Brett Baer and Dave Finkel, who assembled a writers’ room and tried to manage the creative commotion that engulfed the fledgling show. While Tina Fey expected 30 Rock actors to stick to the perfectly constructed scripts, Meriwether encouraged on-set experimentation. “So much good stuff comes out of freedom like that, to be able to just keep the camera rolling and try a bunch of things,” Meriwether suggests. “What we were trying to do was different from 30 Rock. We were trying to do a show that sounded like people were actually talking. Somebody could make a weird face, and that becomes a joke.”
All that spontaneity resulted in long, chaotic days; it sometimes felt as if they were working inside a snow globe that was being continually shaken. J. J. Philbin, who wrote for New Girl after stints at SNL and The OC, says that for the writers who worked on the show in its infancy, “there’s a little bit of the feeling of having been in ‘Nam together! Liz is someone who wants to keep working on it until it is really, really great. And if that means staying awake for three days in a row, she is going to stay awake for three days in a row.”
Deschanel is blunt about the first few seasons of New Girl. “Liz’s work ethic was obviously very strong, but it was almost like . . . too much devotion! It was definitely more like working on a play in college, where everybody is staying up all night, than, say, [working for] a showrunner who has a family. I remember being like, ‘Wait, you are sleeping in your office?’ ” In the first year of shooting, Deschanel recalls, “Everyone gave [Meriwether] blankets for Christmas.”
The show’s distinctive blend of sharp jokes and character-driven emotion sometimes seemed impossible to pull off week after week. “Liz was not afraid to try things, and when it worked out, we would have really cool original episodes,” says Philbin. “The downside was everything is an experiment, and sometimes it didn’t work at all, and we had to roll up our sleeves and come up with something completely different. There was this sense that the show could constantly evolve and adapt to turn into a better version of itself.”
Before New Girl premiered in September
2011, big yellow billboards began popping up all over Los Angeles and other major American cities. They featured a gigantic image of Deschanel in a lime-green vintage dress making a winsome face. The accompanying tagline was SIMPLY ADORKABLE.
“I was driving home one day, and I saw that ‘adorkable’ billboard, and I thought, Oh no!” Philbin moans. “I could imagine the response to that billboard if you hadn’t seen the show yet. It put the emphasis on cute and not necessarily on the other elements of the show.” The writers did not want Jess to be “simply” anything. Brett Baer remembers the shared determination that “she is not going to be this pixie girl. She is going to have edges and corners and missing pieces.”
Misleading as the marketing campaign was, it worked: more than ten million viewers tuned into the premiere, and New Girl continued to be a hit with the precious eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old demographic. It also triggered a virulent backlash. Cute-hate erupted: Vanity Fair recappers classified each New Girl episode as “Adorkable” or “Tweepulsive,” while writer and actress Julie Klausner called Deschanel a “tabula rasa . . . able to reflect with her pale limbs and heart-shaped moon face whatever it is a bewitched boy wants.”
Meriwether was taken aback by “the vitriol coming at Zooey from other women. We are trying to get a show with a female lead and a female showrunner on network television. Shouldn’t that be something celebrated at some level?” she asks, rubbing her hair distractedly. “Does every female character have to be representative of some larger agenda?” Deschanel’s own voice wavers as she recalls, “Women who I would be aligned with philosophically were taking shots at me for being too feminine, saying that I was bringing them down and bringing the feminist movement down.”