Why Damon Wayans Jr.'s Coach Left New Girl (And Why He Came Back)

Back in the day, before seemingly every new TV show started getting a full first season order, showrunners made a thing called a "pilot." This pilot would then be shopped around to various networks, and once the pilot found a home somewhere (like, say, Fox), the show could keep expanding beyond the pilot into a full first season. This is a radically oversimplified explanation of how the pilot process works, but what I'm getting at here is that a pilot would be shot way before the rest of the inaugural season, and sometimes things changed between the pilot and the episodes that followed.

Now that all of that's out of the way, recall, if you can, the pilot of Elizabeth Meriwether's Fox comedy series "New Girl." After Jessica Day (Zooey Deschanel) catches her live-in boyfriend with another woman, she has to frantically search for a new apartment and ends up moving into a loft with three guys she's never met before: oafish Nick Miller (Jake Johnson), uptight yet sleazy Schmidt (Max Greenfield), and super-athletic Ernie "Coach" Tagliaboo (Damon Wayans Jr.). By the end of the episode, they've all formed a solid friendship, but then, in the show's second episode "Kryptonite," Coach is gone, and Winston Bishop (Lamorne Morris) now lives in the loft. So, what happened here?

I'll explain everything, but the gist is this: between shooting the "New Girl" pilot and the show's full-season pickup, Wayans Jr. committed to a different sitcom, David Kaspe's "Happy Endings," which aired on ABC. This is why Morris' Winston, a former (terrible) basketball player and another longtime friend of Nick and Schmidt, moves into the loft after Coach "moves out" between the pilot and "Kryptonite" to live with an unseen girlfriend. Then, when "Happy Endings" got canceled, Wayans Jr. returned to "New Girl" as coach and stuck around for a bit before fully exiting the show as a series regular. Complicated, I know! Let's get into it.

In April 2011, one month before the "New Girl" pilot featuring Damon Wayans Jr. premiered, Wayans Jr. started playing Brad Williams on "Happy Endings," a clever, quick-witted comedy series that serves as a smart spiritual successor to sitcoms like "Friends" and "How I Met Your Mother." Wayans Jr.'s character Brad is married to Jane Kerkovich-Williams (a frankly brilliant Eliza Coupe), and though their incredibly strong relationship does define a lot of Brad's personality, the show also wisely pairs Brad and Jane up in combinations with the other characters — Jane's ditzy younger sister Alex (Elisha Cuthbert), the idealistic Dave Rose Jr. (Zachary Knighton), hopeless romantic Penny Hart (Casey Wilson), and the queer, slovenly Max Blum (Adam Pally). Brad, by day, lives a relatively buttoned-up life as an investment banker but lets himself get silly when he's off the clock, embracing many of Jane's more feminine interests proudly — and the detail that he and Jane met as contestants on the fictional "The Real World: Sacramento" is incredibly funny. (Plus, in one episode, Damon Wayans, Wayans Jr.'s real dad and a phenomenal comedian, plays Brad's dad Francis "Fran" Williams, which just rocks.)

"Happy Endings" is really, really funny — one of my personal favorite jokes is when Max muses, "If Mary Tyler Moore married and then divorced Steven Tyler, then married and divorced Michael Moore, then got into a three way lesbian marriage with Demi Moore and Mandy Moore, would she go by the name Mary Tyler Moore Tyler Moore Moore Moore?" Unfortunately, that didn't prevent it from being canceled after three seasons in 2013. Not only was the show cut short, but it didn't even get a proper series finale, ending on a random and ambiguous note ... but when it comes to Damon Wayans Jr., it did give him an opportunity to return to the inexplicably spacious "New Girl" loft.

Losing "Happy Endings" in its prime absolutely sucked, but at the very least, it freed up Damon Wayans Jr.'s schedule, and it was nice to see him back on "New Girl" as Coach. In season 3, Coach comes back to the loft — narratively, this is explained by him breaking up with that mysterious girlfriend and needing a place to live, mirroring Jess' initial journey — and he's working part-time as a personal trainer. Even though Coach sets a frankly weird boundary in the loft and insists that he doesn't want to form a legitimate friendship with Jess, she wears him down eventually, and he even gets a job as the gym teacher at the middle school where she works. (Jess serves as the school's vice principal after getting her start there as a substitute teacher.)

Despite Coach's short-lived relationship with Jess' best friend Cece Parikh (Hannah Simone), he ends up meeting the love of his life, May Esperas (Meaghan Rath), during a bar crawl in the show's fourth season where they keep ending up at the same spots. After bonding over the fact that they were both "Army brats" who spent their childhoods moving from base to base, they end up dating, even though May is a bit hesitant at first, largely because Coach seems like an unserious guy who's not looking for a real relationship. May is also a classically trained cellist (in one of the couple's sweetest moments, she learns how to play the Monday Night Football theme song for Coach), so, when she's offered an opportunity to join the legendary Metropolitan Opera in New York, Coach exits the show by moving away from Los Angeles.

Coach returns to the series a handful of times as a guest star, but season 4 of "New Girl" is his real final run on the comedy series. Even though he popped in and out thanks to "Happy Endings," it's a testament to the excellence of "New Girl" that the show is able to seamlessly bring him back into the fold, and by the time Wayans Jr. left the series, it found a way to give Coach a perfect ... happy ending.

Both "Happy Endings" and "New Girl" are available to stream on Hulu now.