‘New Girl’ season 3, episode 13 review: Was Jess’ birthday almost too big?

Almost 24 hours after watching Tuesday night’s “New Girl,” we still have no clue how to feel about it. “Birthday” was charming at times, sweet, and it had a pretty funny moment or two. But was this still “New Girl”?

The problem with the end of the episode to us was that it almost tried to change Nick Miller a little too much, suggesting that he really should meet Jess’ unrealistic birthday expectations year after year; also, the big surprise of it came almost out of nowhere. We have no problem with episodes that manage to completely fake us out if we feel like in retrospect it makes complete sense. A great episode of that is the “Scrubs” episode where we lost Brendan Fraser’s character; to date, it remains one of that show’s top two or three episodes.

In this case, we had an episode that was at times good, but also problematic. We like the very funny birthday video at the end would actually be better watching out of context than in the episode, and that’s a problem. The appearances from everyone from Tran to Jess’ parents and co-workers were all nice little touches still, though, and it showed just how much effort that the writers really put into this.

Save for the ending, everything else was pretty genius and perfectly in line with the show, whether it be Cece remembering how to be awful to people at work, Coach and Winston having a bake-off, and Nick screwing up everything on Jess’ birthday morning. We almost wish the ending of the episode kept things this low-key, since we don’t know how Nick’s proposal could ever top this. Grade: B-.

What did you think about birthday? Be sure to share below.