'New Girl' Creator Liz Meriwether Looks Back on Seven Years of the Show

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Consider this mind-blowing detail: New Girl‘s working title was originally Chicks & Dicks, a name so bad that Zooey Deschanel almost passed on reading the script because of it. Can you imagine? “No,” show creator, writer, and director Liz Meriwether says, laughing at the thought. “I knew [Chicks & Dicks] wouldn’t remain, but there’s so many pilots during any given pilot season that it’s nice to have a title that catches people’s attention.” Sure, but what if the right star for the series hadn’t read the pilot because of that? “Yeah, that would have been bad,” she deadpans.

But even when Meriwether and her team OK’d the final title—New Girl—she wasn’t in love with it. To this day, she refers to it as something she just “stuck with” for seven years. “Looking back, having the word ‘girl’ in the title made it hard,” she explains. “A lot of men liked the show, but it definitely made it harder for us to ring in the male audience at first. The show was just as much about guys as about a girl.” Still, “It ended up working, I guess!”

It worked, but not without some detractors along the way, namely those who took issue with promos labeling Deschanel’s character, Jess Day, as “adorkable.” In 2015 Deschanel herself admitted she didn’t identify with the term that, in her words, was “calculated” by the network’s marketing department, even though she’s happy it helped make the show a success. Meriwether feels the same.

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PHOTO: Getty Images

New Girl creator Liz Meriwether

“The marketing really worked,” she says. “We really came out of the gate with amazing numbers, but it was never what the show was.” Meriwether doesn’t fault anyone at Fox, but she never wanted it to be a “cute” show. “I think it was sold out of the gate as that,” she explains. “I honestly think because Jess wore glasses, they needed to make this the marketing campaign. If it was my job to market the show, it probably wouldn’t have opened well. It definitely was difficult for me because it wasn’t the show I’d dreamed of. I had always seen the show as just weird people in L.A. living together.”

That “weird” factor wasn’t lost on Lamorne Morris, who plays Winston. According to Meriwether, he showed up at his audition with a blond wig on and cutoff jean shorts because there were jokes in the pilot about jeggings. “I think he misunderstood,” she says. Meriwether and the team liked what they saw and gave him a test deal, but then Morris got cast in another pilot. When that didn’t work out, he was able to come back to New Girl in episode two. “The fact that he came back around and was in the show does feel like fate,” Meriwether says. “I can’t imagine the show without him in any way.”

“I had always seen the show as just weird people in L.A. living together.”

That same sentiment applies to Max Greenfield, who helped make the role of Schmidt his own. “I had written the character as this kind of, like, Jersey Shore member,” Meriwether reveals. “He was just this very sleazy, idiot character, and Max came in with this amazing take on it. He wanted Schmidt to be a good character, and he played him as someone that was actually insecure. The character got so much deeper and more interesting when he came in to do that audition.”

What Meriwether didn’t anticipate was that the mystery surrounding Schmidt’s first name would take on a life of its own. “It became a thing,” she says. “But then at some point in the fifth season we figured out that Schmidt’s name was Winston. That just made me laugh so hard. Once we found a good idea, I was excited.” But why go with the name Schmidt in the first place? “I thought it was funny, and I liked that it sounded like shit. It’s crazy looking back at these decisions you made on the fly.”

When it came to creating the character of Jess Day, though, the name was a bit more calculated. “I wanted the character to be this indefatigable optimist,” Meriwether says. “Also, there’s this writers’ trick where you keep names short because it helps you with the page count. I wanted to keep the names short and sweet, but also different sounding.”

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PHOTO: Autumn DeWilde/FOX

The cast of New Girl, from left: Hannah Simone, Lamorne Morris, Jake Johnson, Zooey Deschanel, Max Greenfield

Now, seven years after creating their names and identities, Meriwether’s understandably having a tough time closing the door on this chapter of her life. “It’s really hard to say goodbye to these characters,” she says. “I love them. I’ve never worked on anything for seven years. I don’t think I’ve been in a relationship for seven years—even with my husband.”

It’s that love that kept her going, despite the stress and exhaustion of doing 22-plus episodes a season. “Even at the lowest moments, there was just always something that made me laugh,” she explains. Meriwether has her regrets, though. “I’m a perfectionist; if left to my own devices, I would keep editing an episode until it was perfect. There’s so many things I’d do differently, but when we were putting together a clip reel for our wrap party, I went back and watched old episodes, and it was the first time I could really enjoy them. At the time, you’re tired and feeling every mistake or joke that got cut. But going back I was like, ‘Oh, these are pretty funny!’ I couldn’t remember all the craziness to get there.”

Meriwether points to season three as the hardest one to pull off. “There’s stuff that I really liked that everybody hated,” she says. “I like that Schmidt didn’t cheat, but when he tried to date two women at once…Schmidt grew so much from that, but it got nuts. I definitely felt like in the third season I was living and breathing the show so much that it was hard for me to take a step back and think, Oh, what do people really want to watch on this show? I started questioning a lot. To make a show, you really have to have this strong internal compass where you know what the show is and where you’re going. As soon as that gets messed with, suddenly you’re in a tailspin, but you have to make more episodes. You’re kind of like, ‘Uh, let’s try this!’ It’s a journey. Part of doing 22 episodes is that a couple of them are going to be God awful. There’s a couple that I’m genuinely embarrassed by.”

“Part of doing 22 episodes is that a couple of them are going to be God awful.”

Meriwether won’t say what those episodes are, but concedes that no episode is perfect. But the show itself isn’t about perfection. “Our show is this big, messy, crazy thing,” she says. “I went back and watched the bachelor and bachelorette parties episode, where the guys and the girls were separated, and I was laughing so hard.” Same with season one’s “Injured,” when Nick thinks he might have cancer. “I love that story. We stepped out of our comfort zone and tried something new. I was so stupidly fearless because I never written for TV before this show.”

That “stupid fearlessness” might have been the necessary thing to get Meriwether through two of the biggest episodes in the show’s history: the ones with Taylor Swift and Prince. Looking back, she says she “definitely would have tried to get into Taylor Swift’s squad a little bit more,” but it was the finale and she was exhausted. “I was literally limping across the finish line, but I love her music.” As for Prince, “We spent the week with him. It was really crazy. The craziest thing to me was that they were both fans of the show, which is why they did it. To look back on that experience, especially after losing him, I was really blown away by his level of focus on every detail. Maybe I’ll name my baby Prince Taylor.”

It’s hard to think Meriwether would have had any other guest star dreams, but she admits Sarah Silverman was always at the top of her list. “I think it was a scheduling thing, but I always wanted her,” she says. There were also two songs Meriwether wanted for the pilot, but couldn’t secure the rights. “One was a Tori Amos song [that would have played during a scene with] Jess in middle school, because that was a huge part of my adolescence,” she explains. “That was a huge bummer. And then in the pilot, instead of Jess watching Dirty Dancing, it was written to be The Sound of Music. The estate behind the film was like, ‘You can’t rewrite the lyrics to this,’ because the guys sing it and change the lyrics. But it ended up being an iconic part of the show that Jess watches Dirty Dancing—which, by the way, I was definitely a fan of the movie. It’s just funny to think it was originally supposed to be Sound of Music, and to think about those [guys] singing ‘My Favorite Things’ or something.”

Speaking of songs, what about that catchy opening theme that went away over the years? “I think the studio was like, ‘We don’t want to hear that anymore,'” Meriwether explains. “It was a time thing too. When a show is 21 minutes and 34 seconds, you just don’t have time to do a big theme song. But I loved it because [the song] was always supposed to be a little tongue in cheek, like she went around singing a theme song to herself in the pilot.” Fans will have to wait and see if it makes a return in time for the finale, but Meriwether says, “It’s on my list.”

As our time draws to a close, Meriwether reflects on the journey she’s been on since the show first premiered on September 20, 2011. “I was 29. I’m 36 now. I wish I was better at letting people in during those first few years,” she says. “My initial instinct was to do everything myself and not communicate everything. For better or for worse, I had to learn how to accept help and become more of a leader as opposed to a kid who could write. It wasn’t an easy process. It was really hard, and it’s not natural to me. There’s a reason I’m a writer. I like being alone in a room writing. But when I did that, when I opened myself up to the writers and the crew and the actors, it paid back in dividends. It’s why we could keep going for seven years.”

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