The final season of Fox's New Girl was probably as different from the first season as it could have been with the same cast of characters.
The group of friends from the LA loft that viewers grew to love over the course of seven years evolved from confused and hilarious young people with quirky and chaotic lives into family-oriented, real-life adults with just a touch of that quirky chaos still ingrained into the episodes. Watching Jess (Zooey Deschanel), Cece (Hannah Simone), Nick (Jake Johnson), Schmidt (Max Greenfield) and Winston (Lamorne Morris) mature and change throughout the show was a weirdly nostalgic feeling that became overwhelming in the best way during the series’ final episodes.
The first of the two-part finale brought most of the characters from both newer and older seasons that viewers grew fond of together for Nick and Jess’ wedding. The sixth season’s ending would’ve been a poetic and satisfactory finish for the couple, but giving them the marriage they always deserved brought a kind of definite closure that the previous season finale lacked.
The shenanigans of the group at said wedding undoubtedly made the episode one of the best of the season. Nick’s drunken insistence that curses are real after getting some bird droppings on his tux was one of the most laughable, in-character moments he’s had in what felt like a long time. It was the messy, slightly-paranoid Nick that become strangely loveable over the many episodes driven by him causing mayhem.
In the final half hour of the show, Jess’ sentimentality that forced her previous roommates into reminiscing on some odd memories before leaving the loft for good gave New Girl fans the chance to as well. The show revisited Cece and Winston mess-arounds, Schmidt and Nick’s strange college friendship, and of course, True American. It was like a hilarious highlight reel created to truly save the best for last.
The final episode of New Girl succeeded most because it brought the core characters of the series together in the most crucial setting in such a way that revisited the past seasons and the moments that made fans fall in love with those characters. They left their spouses and children behind and reunited as drunken, silly friends to give fans the closure and happy reminiscence they needed for a sense of finality with fondness.
Thank you, New Girl, for a great series finale. Thank you for seven seasons of laughs and feel-good moments, and for five characters that came to feel like friends. You will be missed.
New Girl is available to stream on Hulu and Netflix.
