They're no Lucy and Ethel
At first glance, Jess is unmistakably a girls' girl. She sports polka-dotted frocks and bows in her hair, sings folksy tunes and gets DIY crafty for both her bedroom and her classroom. And underneath that straight-from-a-ModCloth-catalogue exterior, she's all bad puns and "adorkable" physical comedy.
As Entertainment Weekly's Melissa Maerz writes, "New Girl might've started out by focusing on the sole woman in a house full of dudes, but Jess was always a girls' girl, the type who could throw a mean bachelorette party, go clubbing with supermodels, and real-talk with her girlfriends about getting her egg count tested."
But on New Girl, it's more occasion than commonplace that we catch Jess in gal pal mode. The series introduces Jess's partner in crime, Cece, in the first few moments of the pilot. Cece and Jess have apparently been friends since elementary school, despite the fact that they could not be more different (Cece a ball-busting model without a GED, Jess a school teacher). From that pilot, one would gather that their friendship would play a key role in the rest of the series.
Instead, Jess and Cece's friendship seems to be more of a device than a bona fide connection — a means to bring another broad into the mix, if only so that Schmidt can have a love interest. More often than not, their friendship is developed through flashbacks to middle school and fly-by "girls only" moments, and rarely through fortified plots in the present. In fact, in the series' three season run (which at time of writing consisted of some 70 episodes), there have been a mere 11 episodes in which Jess and Cece are engaged in the same narrative conflict.
Maerz calls out New Girl in particular in her essay, "Where are all the female friendships on TV?"
"Maybe it was when Cece (Hannah Simone) and Schmidt (Max Greenfield) split up on New Girl, and Jess (Zooey Deschanel) didn’t spend any time comforting her with smiley-face cupcakes or tearful screenings of Bambi. ... At some point I started to wonder: Do any women on TV have female friends anymore?
"Ever since Jess got serious with Nick, the women in her life have disappeared. ... Even Cece, who's supposed to be Jess's best friend, has been mostly left to herself this season, trying to get over her breakup while Jess plays endless games of rouse the groundhog with Nick."
And it's not for lack of opportunity. For instance, in the first season, Cece has a pregnancy scare. This presented an opportune moment for the writers to bring the two female characters together, for Jess to support Cece through a possibly life-altering development. Moreover, this was ground that would be particularly poignant for the millions of girlfriends who share in their love of this show. Instead, both Jess and Cece were engaged with their respective beaus through the episode, as they so often are.
It's certainly a challenge to stray from the romantic pairings when precedent shows that it's what reels in the viewers. But as The Lizzie Bennet Diaries demonstrated, transmedia extensions can provide creators with the extra room they need to expand on female friendships without compromising those romantic dynamics. In most adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, a linear narrative approach forces creators to strip away much of Austen's world and bring their focus to the Darcy-Elizabeth plot.
But with transmedia, narrative can expand laterally. So, while Schmidt is helping Cece through her pregnancy scare on the mother ship (no pun intended) — that is, the episode that airs on TV — Jess could be there for her through transmedia extensions. Be it through writing her a song and sharing it on YouTube or SoundCloud, or making her a Pinterest board that could get her excited about the possibility of motherhood, Jess could be there for her best friend without detracting from Schmidt's efforts.
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