‘New Girl’ season 3, episode 8 review: The great menu crisis is (mostly) funny
We are now two episodes into the Coach era on “New Girl,” and there are some good things about what the show is up to right now. The lines are still funny, and you get the feeling that slowly and surely, the writers are figuring out how to properly implement him into the story. It’s hard to have a comedy that has six characters who all need something to do, but remember that “The Big Bang Theory” does it with seven.
This is still a little bit of a word in progress with Coach, but Tuesday night’s “Menus” was significantly better than the strip club-themed episode that marked his debut on the show. Through his efforts to train Nick, we basically saw both an insecurity for him and for Nick play out as both of them are struggling to be who they are right now. Coach is a blowhard that likes to feel in charge, but his girlfriend left him and now he’s living with some old pals. Meanwhile, Nick is … Nick. He doesn’t want to work out unless he has to, but he almost has to in order to make Coach feel better.
What is slightly ironic here is that despite having not a ton to do this week in terms of story, Winston and Schmidt probably had their funniest stuff to do since the start of this season. Schmidt is starting to slowly get himself out of this sad place, and Winston found great comedy in a wheelchair and an allergy to MSG, which is something that Jess tried to use to her advantage in a war against a Chinese food restaurant. This, in turn, was just her way of deflecting her anger at work for not authorizing field trips for her and her kids.
The character who is actually really suffering right now is Cece, which probably makes the show at times suffer from masculine overload. She was only featured briefly tonight, and that was for Coach to awkwardly hit on her. The only part of this story that could be interesting is if Coach and Cece start to date, and then Schmidt can completely melt down over it as he starts to further realize how lonely he is.
So all in all, “Menus” was pretty funny. It wasn’t a “New Girl” classic like most of season 2, but it did at least remind us some of the standout episodes from early this season. Grade: B.
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Photo: Fox