New Girl = Babe

 It's strange how summer has left us so quickly. I remember taking a bath in Lake Michigan just a few weeks ago, loofah in hand, scrubby bubbles in a basket next to me; a hermetically sealed bottle of Old Granddad Bourbon floating in a bag tethered to my leg with a piece of twine. "Who needs a home when you got a lake this nice and the sun is still out at 9PM?" I said to the elderly woman floating past. She nodded politely, then looked at my junk and swam away shouting something or other and now I have to go to the beach up the street like a jerk. Just like that, fall is bringing in cool temps and fresh breezes, which really helps keep my smelliness down to a manageable level.

For a reason that is possibly deep-seated and psychologically troubling, fall always gives me anxiety. I like to think that it has everything to do with the fact that this is the time of year that school starts, and I'm still at an age where I've gone to school longer than I haven't gone. It's an enjoyable anxiousness, because I really loved going to school, more for the social aspect than the "learning stuff" aspect, and the thought of seeing people that I generally ignored all summer (Super Mario Kart wasn't gonna play itself you guys) was exciting to me.

I was also filled with another strange anticipation; after weeks upon weeks of absolutely nothing to watch on TV, all of a sudden the old Zenith in my parent's house (that I shit you not was encased in a wooden box and weighed 1200 pounds if it was an ounce) was on from the minute I got home to the minute I went to bed. My old man worked for one of the big three TV stations for his entire adult life, and he instilled his love of TV to me from an early age. Right after school it was all about our local FOX affiliate, which played The Real Ghostbusters (none of that fake Ghostbusters shit for us, no way), Duck Tales (ooweeoo!), Tiny Toons Adventures and Animaniacs, followed by The Simpsons and Married with Children in syndication, and then all manner of raunchy TV that my dad never seemed to mind but that my mom would turn off from time to time and tell me & my siblings to get our pinche homework done. I wish I had listened to my mom more because god knows I could have really learned something about priorities instead of being an adult with worse ADD than I'm capable of dealing with most of the time.

TV taught me a lot though, from how to tell my loved ones if my camp counselor tried to grab my wiener, to how many caffeine pills was TOO MANY caffeine pills:

I'm guessing I'm not alone in thinking maybe she just needed a few more pills? Anybody?

So as the years have passed, I've seen pilots for shows come and go, many with great promise, only to be horribly let down time and time again. I know that I'm only in it for the few gems that come my way, and much like any hobo, if you want to find the untouched quarter pounder in the dumpster behind the McDonalds, sometimes you gotta wade through mounds of old diapers and a backpack with a raccoons living in it (Just trust me on that metaphor).

What I'm trying to tell you is, I got a sneak peak at two of Fox's pilots, and they are really promising.

The first is Zooey Deschanel's comedy vehicle The New Girl, a show about a girl named Jess who comes home from a trip a day early and finds that her boyfriend is cheating on her with a goddamn ginger. It kinda lost me bad credit loans right there because the scene takes place in broad daylight and it's pretty well established that gingys have to be ensconced in darkness always (Do you think Conan could ever host the Today show? NOT EVEN IF HE WANTED TO).

Jess moves in to a new apartment with three dudes, a gym instructor they call Coach, a total bro named Schmidt who is ultimately trying to break his douche-baggyness, but can't shake it, even though he has to toss money in a douche bag jar anytime he does anything douchey, and a bartender friend named Nick who is clearly the sensitive one that, when you inevitably watch this program with your girlfriend, she's going to ask you why you aren't more like him. After that awkward getting-to-know-each-other phase, the guys convince Jess to leave the house and mix it up with some dudes. Schmidt runs into his douche bag frenemies—neither of which is a word my spellcheck recognizes, but that's the age we live in—and hijinx ensue.

Now, you should know that this show is pretty blatantly pandering toward a demographic that I am loathe to be lumped into; young unmarried city folk whose friends mean the world to them and who are clearly underserved by TV these days, unless you count EVERY SHOW ON TV THESE DAYS. One episode in and the characters fall rigidly into their archetypes, particularly Zooey Deschanel's Jess, a girl that is ultimately very lovable and sweet, even though she awkwardly falls down a lot (which lazy screenwriters seem to think is the only way for women to be funny). I love that this is a single camera show without a laugh track, and it did get me to laugh out loud more than once, so it's already more enjoyable to me than How I Met Your Mother, which is too cutesy on the whole. I will honestly forgive a lot that's wrong with this show based solely on my love of Zooey Deschanel and her old-timey whimsy (right down to a pair of cute black glasses and awkward dance moves!), and did I mention that she sings a lot on the show? If you haven't heard her group She & Him, I highly recommend it for unsecured loans when you're riding your old-timey whimsical bike down the street with a puppy sitting in a basket on the front of it (which I do about 4 times a week). The show is on par with the underrated Cougar Town in the not-cutting-edge-but-still-pretty-damn-enjoyable department.

I also saw Terra Nova, another program that will be airing on Fox this season, but in true TV show fashion, you'll need to hang on til next week to find out about it. Same Grandpa Lou Time, Same Grandpa Lou channel.