Whether it was the way the show unabashedly tackled the dynamics of modern-day male friendship, or tackled race better than I’ve ever seen it done in a sitcom (see Cabin, below), New Girl showed an emotional consciousness that was centered in the relationships between the characters and their love for each other, but also in a rapidly changing world that sees love take many forms. If shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother gave us the sitcom as a reflection of stumbling youth, New Girl took that and added a tenderness that was wholly of the 21st century - Friends for Zoomers, if you will. In hindsight, there was little to no chance that New Girl would become what it did - after all, its original marketing tagline was “ Simply adorkable.” Eventually, however, adorkable turned into endearing, and the formula of the quirky girl (Zooey Deschanel) and her four male roommates became something much more than the sum of its parts. For another, sitcoms were just starting to move beyond the multi-camera format, relying on quick-and-easy laughs to keep viewers interested. For one, women were not widely written as the multifaceted, morally complex, antihero-potential-having characters that currently populate our screens.

When New Girl first aired on Fox nine years ago, television was a very different landscape.

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