Review // New Girl (Redux)

27 Jan

So when I reviewed the pilot episode of New Girl, maybe some people thought I was being unfair because it was only the first show. Lots of other people seemed to like it, but because I didn’t like the first episode. However, I’ve decided to give New Girl another chance and see how it has progressed through time (through five weeks, I think).

In this episode, Nick (I learned his name!) is going on a date with his overly-ironic co-worker Amanda but Jess accidentally walks in on him naked when she goes to ask him to turn his music down, and laughs at him before running off. She feels a bit bad, but Nick feels worse and rightly points out that Jess is so immature that she can’t even name his privates without making some kind of funny face or noise like an idiot. Meanwhile, Winston (I learned his name too!) has had a disastrous interview because he doesn’t know any current events from the past two years, on account of him being away playing basketball (or something like that). So Schmidt puts him to the task of researching every event from the past two years.

I have to say, the quality of this episode is much higher than the pilot episode. Jess, while still quite immature, seems more likable and down-to-earth than before. She can admit that she’s done wrong and sets about finding a way to talk to Nick who doesn’t want to be approached. Okay, this means that she makes a feeling stick and tries to pass it round, but at least she’s trying to reach out to others instead of being alienating like she was in the pilot. Meanwhile, on the mens side of things, Nick is a bit grumpy in this one but that’s understandable and his eventual body confidence leads to a pretty funny situation (if only because of his dodgy little dance, which is nicely surreal).

Plus, there’s a nice little bit of satire on how sarcasm can go completely overboard. Aside from this, there seems to be more of a sitcom situation here – whilst the pilot seemed a bit ragged in narrative, this episode is more tightly controlled in that typical sitcom way. To explain, now there’s a set up, a dilemma, and an eventually neat and warm resolution that tries to include a few laughs so its not too fuzzy. Still, it’s still slightly unbelievable that three single men living in a flat with Jess can’t be even slightly attracted to her: I know this sounds a bit strange, since I like my comedies to break the mould a bit, but surely this storyline is coming up somewhere? If there’s ever a final series, surely there’ll be some kind of romance storyline. It really would be a game-changer if that didn’t happen (and I will actually love it for that – a show that actually says men and women can just be friends!)

So to conclude… yes, maybe I misjudged New Girl. Maybe I won’t watch it religiously every week but if it’s a lazy, boring Friday with nothing on then I’d be fine with sticking New Girl on to see what’s going on with these mis-matched flatmates. Sometimes it’s good to realise that you’re wrong.

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Chairlift // Met Before

26 Jan

Chairlift are back after four years and have released their second LP Something. This is one of the first songs to be released from the album and fans of their debut LP Does You Inspire You will notice that while Caroline Polachek’s breathy, fuzz-surrounded vocals remain and they’re still floating somewhere in the orbit of psychedelia, the band have a bit more of a positive tone. Oh, and try not to think that ‘Bruises’ was too positive - have a really good listen to the lyrics and then you might think twice about how sunny that little i-Pod advertiser was. By contrast, ‘Met Before’ is one of those ‘walking down the street, feeling good and smiling away’ tunes, both catchy and indie without alienating any of the original fans (and as a massive fan of their debut, I can safely say that I’m very excited for Something). ‘Met Before’ is definitely more accessible than ‘Sidewalk Safari’, though that is no less invigorating and still causes a brilliant thrill. January 2012 is looking to be a bit less dead than usual, if only because these guys are back.

Something is out on the 24th January

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Classicism: The By-Word For the 2012 Oscars

25 Jan

Watching the nominations for the 2012 Academy Awards yesterday, it dawned on me that there’s a very distinct theme running through this year’s nominees. I thought of a decent (though perhaps not 100% accurate word if you’re gonna get really technical!) word to sum this up: classicism.

Let’s take the nominees for Best Picture first. Now, let’s look at what must be the front-runners for this prize. Since 1980, every winner of Best Picture has gained at least a nomination in the Best Editing category too – lending weight to my constant argument that the editing of a film is perhaps one of the most important aspects of making a good movie. So using this formula we can whittle it down to The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo and Moneyball. In true Rolf Harris style: can you guess what it is yet? Hugo is, give or take, about George Melies and the birth of cinema, while The Artist centres on the trials of an actor at the birth of sound in cinema. The Descendants is in a long line of famiy-based dramas, while Moneyball is a sports film (which are, if you look at nominations from past years, pretty popular with old Oscar).

The Best Actor category is perhaps the best for showing what I’m trying to point out here: if we exclude Demian Bichir in A Separation (of which I’m very happy – a foreign film being nominated in something other than the Best Foreign Film category! Huzzah!), then we’re left with Jean Dujardin in The Artist, George Clooney in The Descendants, Brad Pitt in Moneyball and Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Dujardin seems like the odd one out here – but he does play a classic actor (albeit fictional, but the sentiment is still there). Clooney, Pitt and Oldman all seem either to be classic actors and distinguished and towing that line between “serious” acting and superstardom, much like bygone days.

Oscar Trio: Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in Moneyball

So really, doesn’t old Oscar seem like he’s picking old-timey production values and star quality this year? There are probably two contributing factors to this: firstly, the fact that the 2011 Oscars were dominated, at least in the major categories, by The King’s Speech – i.e. America and Hollywood was defeated somewhat by Britain (at least on paper: if we look at the funding and all that, America contributed more to the success of The King’s Speech than you’d imagine). Secondly, the unconventional contest between Avatar and The Hurt Locker in 2010 brought the increasingly technological nature of Hollywood cinema to the fore: if Avatar had won, it would have meant that Oscar acknowledged big bucks and flashy CGI over general filmic integrity. Oddly though, I agreed when people suggested that using motion capture is still acting – but there’s still good acting and bad acting, whether you do it in a bobbly suit or not.

Few of the nominations in the Best Picture category this year can be said to be making big bucks, or indeed that loads of money was spent on them – Moneyball and The Descendants are what I’d like to call ‘indie-Clooney’ and ‘indie-Pitt’ (which they do much better in than your standard commercial fare) and so far The Artist has made less than a million at the Box Office. Yep, seriously. People have even demanded their money back because it’s silent. Yep, really. Despite all that publicity. The directors acknowledged this year are also mostly of the 70s old-guard or are very much in step with that movement – so we have Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick and Steven Spielberg (sort of) nominated. Maybe they’ve all perfected their art.

So perhaps we can say that Oscar is acknowledging three things: that big money doesn’t necessarily make a good movie, that artistic merit is best, and that artistic merit is even greater when it’s American. This return to a sense of classicism might seem a bit mean of Oscar in a technological age, but there are more truly great movies nomiated this year than in previous – so a classic feel might just bump up the excitement about who’s going to win on the night.

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TV Review // Confessions of a Nurse

25 Jan

There’s an awful lot of people out there who want to be a nurse: mostly women, admittedly, but most of them don’t have that caring and loving streak that you need. Or the patience. Or the sheer willpower for that matter. I suggest that if you’re thinking of being a nurse, or are in the process of becoming one and are doing one of those college courses (like Latoya the healthcare assistant ends up doing in this first episode) then watch Confessions of a Nurse. It’s horrible really.

Admittedly, this programme does have the distinct whiff of ‘bless the NHS’ and focuses on the very angelic and caring nurses – and I bet we all know that there’s a lot of them out there that really couldn’t give a damn about the patients. Need we be reminded of recent Government reports in to patient care? Even one of the nurses here points out that most people think it’s an easy job because you have to do a lot of administration and they completely forget about the whole patient care part. So it feels like More4 are treading the line a bit here – they certainly don’t want to portray nurses like that, and for impartial spectators that would be a horrible experience where you’d never want to go into hospital again.

But bless ‘em, it’s difficult to be mad at people like Latoya who are only paid £14,000 a year to decant peoples’ urine and change the contents of stoma bags. She works every shift she can to buy a car (which she eventually does) and wishes she’d stayed at college (which she eventually goes back to – ‘there’s only so many stoma bags you can change’, she explains). Sarah has received a £5,000 pay increase with a massive catch – she has to look after the entire hospital at night without neglecting her usual nursing duties. So when one of her patients is close to death, she knows she can’t stay in the middle of the night because her pager will go off at any minute. But she does manage to move out of her mum’s house and becomes the proud owner of a lot of Union Jack furniture. Meanwhile, Debbie is a staff nurse working in a nice ward… but she gets more than she bargained for when she’s transferred temporarily to an orthopaedic trauma ward. Suddenly it’s all kicking off and she has to deal with abusive patients and a number of language barriers. Then she goes home to a man who doesn’t ask her how her day has been – Debbie explains that she keeps home and work like separate in case he doesn’t want to eat his dinner afterwards.

It’s mildly insightful, if a little wishy-washy. Everything comes out clean in the end and the nurses are typically bubbly and chatty, but it lacks a bit of drama – the closest thing we get to it is Sarah treating a patient in cardiac arrest. Unfortunately, this is acompanied by a slightly dull voice-over telling us what she’s thinking. The major thing is that nursing isn’t glamorous. It actually looks a bit dull if you take Latoya as a marker for what they’re meant to do. Perhaps Junior Doctors is more for those who want a bit of excitement in their real-life medical documentaries. But I missed that in favour of MasterChef. Floops.

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Lana Del Rey: Inauthenticity Is Everywhere

19 Jan

It’s a bit difficult to get away from every aspect of Lana Del Rey at the minute, even more so because she’s releasing her debut LP in the midst of the traditional dead-season. But can we just address this whole thing about, er, her? Where she came from, and all that? Because is it really that shocking?

When Del Rey seemed to come out of nowhere with her slow, perfectly pitched indie ballad ‘Video Games,’ it was everyone’s favourite song, topping every Best of 2011 poll you could just about find, apart from the Guardian reader poll which took the mick by making Matt Cardle number one. That was hardly a protest against Del Rey, but maybe some people did honestly vote against her because of the massive row that’s bubbling over how authentic she really is.

Some short time after the release of ‘Video Games’, it was revealed that Del Rey – who was said to have been scraping a living in a NY trailer park – was actually Lizzie Grant, the daughter of a successful estate agent. Oh, and the apparently handwritten ‘Video Games’ was actually penned by Eg White and Guy Chambers, who’ve previously worked with ADELE, Florence Welch and Katie Melua. So maybe a bit of a cheat there, but does it really matter who writes the song if it’s actually good? Would you rather have had Grant/Del Rey write a song herself only for it to be terrible, unlistenable rubbish? Proabably not: for a little while we were all just a bit enchanted by ‘Video Games’, and I don’t think it matters who wrote it.

But let’s face it, it’s not that we’re really bothered about is it? It’s the fact that we feel a bit cheated, the fact that we might have found someone who appeared authentic, the real deal, only for it to blown away. Although, on closer inspection…. a perfect ballad, a massive pout, wonderful styling, a teensy-bit-too professional-looking video, the accurate PR campaign…. My god! The signs were all over the place. Out of these the part I find most offensive is the fact that Grant has had collagen implants in her lips to enhance that pout of hers – but the story of me against plastic surgery seems a bit diminished today, since everything about Del Rey is fake, so the lips are just a little segment of her brilliant PR styling.

But seriously, is this really that shocking? Indie-types are always on the search for authenticity, yet it is seriously lacking in today’s music scene. If we search around the pop-end of things, where Del Rey is poised to make it big, then we have Lady Gaga prancing around in unrealistic costumes, Beyonce pretending that the Princess’ fairy-tale wedding is still highly achievable and Rihanna wandering around Belfast as if there was never any tension in Northern Ireland. Now that’s good fantasy! Good job a farmer attempted to bring her back to earth.

But even if we turn our heads to the indie-world, escapism and inauthenticity is everywhere. On the escapism end, we have SBTRKT constantly wearing his trademark mask, hiding from the world (what’s under there? What is he hiding?) and Florence Welch pretending it’s 1968 all over again at Abbey Road with some psychedelic video editing. And let’s face it, most lad-rock is rife with inauthenticity. The whole point of lad-rock is to look authentic, but isn’t this just a bit of a front for the style of music they want to play? Do Liam and Noel Gallagher really want to keep plugging away at lad-rock when everyone knows that they have made it big? Likewise, The Enemy once sang that they’d live and die in these towns, but they must have a few bob now: are they really being authentic with that message now?

Of course, Del Rey’s biggest problem is her overt sexualisation, just enhanced by those lip fillers. Former Titus Andronicus member Amy Klein wrote a scathing report on Del Rey for Brooklyn Vegan in which she labelled the nostalgia and submissiveness of Del Rey a serious problem for women. I am inclined to agree, but only on the basis that we don’t have enough female artists who are not willing to use their sexuality and submission to get them somewhere. Looking at the list of pop-stars before, Gaga and Rihanna (the latter in particular) could both be said to be trading off on their perfect, fantasy-woman looks to snag a (leery male) audience alongside their apparently “empowered” teenage fanbase.

I think that Del Rey is a lovely singer but her image has clearly been tampered with by the record companies. This poses a serious problem for feminists and those who believe talent is what counts (and that’s really all that should count) but if we take a good hard look at what’s out there, it’s hard not to argue that Grant is just playing the game that most artists do now. In these harsh times, maybe we need a bit of escapism – Del Rey is perfect for that.

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Akira Suspended: Thank the Heavens!

10 Jan

Did anyone ever, ever, ever think that shooting Akira as a Hollywood live-action film would be a good idea? Surely Im not the only person who thinks this is as ghastly as Spike Lee reworking Oldboy, except at least that was already with real people. Well, huzzah! Raise your hands in joy because the project has been put back yet again.

I think it is wonderful that the reason for this suspension, though not yet fully confirmed, is rumoured to be the script, which has plagued Warner Bros. for a long time now. I’m personally glad that this somewhat ironic twist came about: the original Akira was attacked by fans of the manga series for rushing the saga – the manga had not yet finished its run before it was animated, and the character building and plot development that can happen through a manga saga was somewhat lost in space in the animation. In the film, all the themes under the sun surface: corruption, bad capitalism, disenchanted youth, awful education, repression, love, superpowers, good vs. evil struggles, military oppression… it goes on. But it somehow works in the 1988 cult classic. It takes a few viewings admittedly, but its a grower and says more about Japanese society than you might first believe.

But it is not a happy story. Everyone is doomed to a greater or lesser extent and its never entirely clear who are the bad guys are who are the good guys. Steve McQueen (of Hunger and Shame fame) recently said that hed never direct an American movie because they require happy endings. But most good movies have a sad or ambiguous ending at best (well, in my opinion, although there are many exceptions!)

This isn’t exactly fodder for Hollywood types elsewhere either: Akira makes you think outside of its action-packed, fast-paced surface. Blink and youll miss a key plot point or twist in the tale. Maybe youll miss out on the relationships (often crooked) between people. I know I did. So is this really blockbuster fare? People complained that emInception/em was far too complicated, but in comparison to Akira, thats a doddle to understand. At least Inception didn’t have a meandering, almost non-linear storyline and characters so minor yet so vital to actually knowing what the heck is going on.

But aside from the complexity factor, do we really want Hollywood messing up another foreign film? The remakes of all the J-Horrors (The Ring and The Grudge in particular) werent great after all. And do we really want Kristen Stewart playing Kei? Do we really want our mysterious terrorist-come-heroine-come-telekenetic wonder Kei played by someone whose charisma amounts to that of 3 planks of wood tied together with ropey string? And I’ve actually seen her in more than the Twilight movies. I think I’m being kind: slacker can’t be bothered attitude wont cut it when playing Kei.

I’m not trying to be snobby here and say that America ruins foreign films or that people cant be bothered to watch something with subtitles – Akira was dubbed, after all (although the subtitles are better and a bit less random!). I just dont want an amazing film to be tarnished by the fact that everyone will love a Hollywood version. Is that so much to ask?

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The Weeknd // Montreal

9 Jan

If you’ve never really listened to The Weeknd before then this is as good as any place to start. ‘Montreal’ is taken from the Canadian R’n'B man’s third and, apparently, last mixtape, Echoes of Silence (released, ironically, almost silently over Christmas – even Pitchfork only got round to reviewing it a couple of days ago). It’s a bit melancholy, slightly spcaed out but still very noticeable of its genre. You can’t help but notice that this isn’t a normal kind of break-up song either. ‘Montreal’ is all you you you rather than me me me: the amount of times the significant other is referenced like a member of the dark side is numerous, but this just adds to its slightly emotionally punishing nature. But if you listen hard enough, you might hear the faint French in the background: ‘I was crying, I wasn’t crying’ adds the sense of vulnerability. But the Weeknd are good at this. Often they’re deeper than how they appear on the surface, and ‘Montreal’ is a perfect introduction to these hidden lairs.

Echoes of Silence is out now (and a review will be coming shortly!)

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If… Only Cameron Would Stop Trying

8 Jan

There’s an awful lot of us who still remember the sheer horror and draining feeling when David Cameron proudly announced to the world that one of his favourite bands was The Smiths. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with liking The Smiths, or that you should be a certain type to like them… but the whole comment seemed to smack somewhat of inauthenticity and trying to be like people he has no clue about. Cameron might have liked the music – and who wouldn’t enjoy it – but does the image and message? Not sure it quite hit the right notes.

Well, now he’s dropped another clanger, in the form of declaring that his favourite movie (that has had a big influence on him no less) is If…

Yep, If…, Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 cult classic that has the distinct aura of an anti-establishment ethos. What am I saying? ‘The distinct aura’? More like it’s plastered all over the place, not least in the famous denouement, in which Malcolm MacDowell guns down teachers and students alike at the private school he attends (Cheltenham College, to be precise).

So it’s very difficult to see what exactly Cameron is identifying with here. It certainly can’t be the machine-gunning: wouldn’t that just be a bit daft? The idea that Cameron could identify with the slaughter of his own people seems so disingenuous that it could be the worst PR stunt ever. Either that or he’s not talking about the same film as we are. But that seems unlikely. Or he’s just seriously deluded. Which is more likely, but still a bit unlikely. So maybe he likes all the bits before the slaughter, where there’s some good old nostalgia for him (or what I can only imagine as nostalgia – who knows what goes on behind the doors of a private boarding school like Eton and Cheltenham? If… could be accurate. Maybe).

But I think Sarfraz Manzoor got it the most right in his article about celebrities trying to look, you know, normal. The thing is, the more Cameron tries to look normal, the more he alienates himself from everyone. He doesn’t just need gaffes about tourettes, or nurses and being sexist in the Commons to make him look stupid/ clueless/ a complete douchebag. Nope, he’s trying to claim that he likes things he obviously doesn’t get the point of to try and make him look cool. Or a bit more normal. A comment on the Guardian got it very right with the observation that Cameron seems to like all of the cultural things that tell him he’s awful.

At least when Gordon Brown namedropped the Arctic Monkeys he ceased and desisted. At least he might have thought it wasn’t such a good idea to try and look down with the kids and went back to being kind of normal and not that try-hard. Cameron’s constant claims to liking cult classics like If…, The Smiths, The Jam and his continual obsession with namedropping Danish crime thriller Forbrydelsen is making him look stupid. Well, more than normal.

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Michael Kiwanuka Tops Sound of 2012 Poll

7 Jan

In its annual poll of people they think are going to make it big in the forthcoming year, the BBC’s Sound Of poll has placed Michael Kiwanuka as the best bet for 2012.

Kiwanuka, from London, credits everyone from Otis Redding to Bob Dylan to Miles Davis as influences, as this can definitely be found in his work. The Beeb call him a ‘soul singer’ but I’m not sure if this is entirely accurate. I admit, Kiwanuka has a soulful voice and some of his work has that retro vibe of 70s soul records, such as this brilliant cut:

… But Kiwanuka is also heavily influenced by acoustic music and from my first experience of his work, the gently paced and fairly breezy ‘Home Again’ (and that’s not a put-down, it’s lovely), you might have been forgiven for thinking that Kiwanuka was going to be part of the new-folk phenomenon that seems to have blown everyone away over the last couple of years (not that I’m going to anything foolish like say he’s the male Laura Marling – he has more musical breadth than that).

Perhaps what is most surprising about this poll is just how good Kiwanuka is in comparison to some of the other BBC Sound of poll winners of recent years. Last year it was won by Jessie J, who was successful yes (and the poll claims to do nothing but select artists that it thinks will do well in the charts, which seems daft when you think that actual talent could be recognised at least once a year) but did little to forward the UK’s musical image. Before that other winners included Adele, Mika and 50 Cent. Yep, 50 Cent. Admittedly, the lists are usually better the further you go down the list but this year it’s hard to tear everyone apart. This is partly because the list is so diverse, including Frank Ocean, Azaelia Banks (warning: bad language there!), Skrillex and my personal favourites Niki & the Dove, but also because the talent is so much better than before. Perhaps this year the Beeb decided they wanted to try and be cool or actually up with new artists in light of the Critics Choice Award at the BRITs, but be that as it may, it’s definitely the best list yet.

Congratulations Michael!

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Review // New Girl – Pilot Episode

6 Jan

I can’t be the only person out there who kind of detested Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer. Apart from being generally being a bit of an awful person, constantly leading poor old Jospeph Gordon-Levitt on before toying with him constantly, singing weakly to ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, dumping him harshly saying she can’t have relationships then getting married…. well, wasn’t Summer just a bit too quirky and unreal for everyone? Well brace yourselves: in New Girl she is Summer times a billion, moving the ‘quirky’ lever from endearing to a teensy bit unbearable.

In New Girl Deschanel is Jess, a young woman who finds out her boyfriend is having an affair, so she moves in (for some reason never really explained) with three single men of varying stereotypes. And they only let her move in because her best friend is a model. During this pilot episode, the guys decide to try and help Jess rebound, she has numerous failings before being led on by one of the guys’ workmates who abandons her in favour of a party, but the fellas are nice guys and go to the restaurant and act all quirky by singing/shouting the words of ‘Time of My Life’ from Dirty Dancing to cheer Jess up in true light-hearted comedy style.

The worstthing about this comedy is that Deschanel doesn’t attempt to break out of her role as the kookiest girl on the block – Jess is occasionally (very, very occasionally) quite human and vulnerable, but this is spoiled by her insistence that watching Dirty Dancing six times a day and waiting outside of doors in flared red dresses with hands on hips is normal behaviour. Now, I occasionally sing to myself, talk to myself and think crazy things (quite often asking very ridiculous questions that are pointless but seem good at the time) but in Jess these qualities are exaggerated in the extreme. Surely no-one would think that wearing dungarees constitutes a ‘sexy farmgirl’ look.

Alongside Jess, the rather 2-D men are quite appealing (despite the very set types of douchebag, angry gym guy and semi-geek). It’s a shame we don’t really know any of their names apart from Schmidt though – it seems as if Jess’s overbearing nature got in the way of me learning the names of Mr. Semi-Geek and Mr. Angry-Gym-Guy. Still, the best interludes of actual comedy and genuine wit came from the men, particularly the 30 Rock-style flashbacks and recollections. Mr.Gym-Guy had the best 20 seconds of the whole episode when he shouts encouragement at a customer in a very aggressive style. Aside from this, the men could actually live up to their own failings: Schmidt is more than happy to put money in the Douchebag Jar when he leers over Jess’s model friend, at least being able to admit that he’s a bit of a creepy wannabe-lothario. Too bad Jess couldn’t just admit that she was acting a bit too weirdly.

These incredibly short glimmers of hope gave the best impression of what New Girl could be – a kind of buddy-bromance-come-romance with witty insights and, y’know, funny jokes. Okay, this isn’t the type of comedy that has set-up punchlines, which is absolutely fine if actually done right with wit, but New Girl lacks that entirely. Then again, should we expect anything less from a show sponsored by a Nina Ricci perfume that uses a very flowery version of the already fairly flowery ‘Sunday Girl’?

Don’t get me wrong here: Zooey is lovely and endearing in the right circumstances. Summer was a character, not the real Zooey (obviously) but she wasn’t a Deschanel creation – New Girl was created by Deschanel. Could we just have more of She & Him? They’re the acceptable Zooey level: whimsical yet comforting. New Girl could have been a great comedy, but it lacks the charm that Deschanel puts into her musical career.

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