‘New Girl’ season 2, episode 4 review: The fountain of youth

Even though “New Girl” is a show about people who really are still pretty young (at least in the context that they are all in their thirties), it’s really rather funny just how many episodes this show has that deal with the concept of aging. The latest example of this? What we ended up seeing on Tuesday night’s new episode, which really as a rather interesting take on what happens when you realize that you are no longer “cool.”

The story here for Schmidt was rather simple: when a group of young people moved in to a nearby apartment, he tried as hard as humanly possible to identify with them … to hard. He was really like the teenage dad who goes to the birthday party of his teenage daughter and sings Justin Bieber lyrics. None of these new neighbors wanted to do anything with him, and Jess won them over by lying and stealing the catchphrase from Steve Urkel in “Family Matters.” (Yes, we are starting to feel old, as well.)

Really, we didn’t really find this storyline as funny as the producers probably wanted or meant it to be. Why? There just wasn’t that much going on, and the serious lack of Nick Miller here really bummed us out given that he is the show’s best character. Also, this is already a road the show went down with Nick in season 1, where we saw Nick attend a college party with a ton of teenage girls. “New Girl” does not need to repeat itself, especially when it is only in its second season. Were there still some funny moments? Sure; if nothing else, it did give us some more insight as to why Jess enjoyed being around younger people in that they were not judgmental about her not having a job.

What did you think about this episode?