Every Season Of New Girl, Ranked

I hope that it's not a hot take, at this point, to say that "New Girl" is good, but "New Girl" is really, really good. Created by Liz Meriwether for Fox, the series — which I'll freely admit has a name that's outdated by the middle of the pilot, basically — centers around peppy, bubbly, and downright effervescent teacher Jessica Day, who has to hastily find a new place to live in Los Angeles after she catches her live-in boyfriend cheating on her. After finding a loft full of guys on Craigslist, Jess moves in with Nick Miller (Jake Johnson), Ernie "Coach" Tagliaboo (Damon Wayans Jr.), and the man simply known as Schmidt (Max Greenfield), though Coach "moves out" after the pilot episode and Winston Bishop (Lamorne Morris) takes his place. (This happened because, in the real world, Wayans Jr. booked a different gig — a lead role on ABC's "Happy Endings" — but when that show got canceled, he came back for a little while. It was a whole thing.)

With all of that said, "New Girl," despite that dud of a name, is an incredibly whip-smart and funny series featuring a cast with crackling chemistry and hilarious, fast-paced scripts with cutaways that never feel cheap or egregious. So which seasons of this series are "New Girl" at its very best? Output does vary, but I'll say this: binge-watching "New Girl" makes it clear that even its weaker seasons have some real gems. With that said, here are all seven seasons of "New Girl," ranked from good to the very best.

As much as I love that there's a little extra "New Girl" for me to enjoy, we can all be honest with ourselves and say that the show could have easily ended with its sixth season, and maybe it should have done exactly that. Add in a three-year time jump from the season 6 finale, and season 7 of "New Girl" feels particularly unnecessary, but still, it has some highlights here and there.

By this point in the narrative, basically everybody is paired off and most of them are expecting babies or are already parents. Schmidt and Jess' best friend Cece Parikh (Hannah Simone) have a particularly precocious daughter named Ruth, and Winston and his former policing partner turned romantic partner Aly (standout recurring player Nasim Pedrad) are expecting, while Jess and Nick are together but not married yet (royally pissing off Jess' dad Bob, portrayed by the always welcome Rob Reiner). Babies and marriage are two things that can absolutely ruin a sitcom, but even when season 7 of "New Girl" gets bogged down by the domestic lives of its main characters, it finds time for perfect cutaway gags — ask any fan about "a white man broke in today," and they'll put it in their top overall "New Girl" ranking — and it really sticks the landing with the show's series finale "Engram Pattersky." (It's a classic Winston mess-around, my friends). Also, it's incredibly funny that, after seven seasons, we learn Schmidt's real first name ... and it's Winston. Nice touch, "New Girl."

To be completely fair to "New Girl," it's certainly not the show's fault that Zooey Deschanel got pregnant during production of its fifth season and it made legitimately no sense for the show's writers to simply work it into Jess' overall narrative. There's an argument to be made that, in Deschanel's absence, the show could have relied on the rest of its unbelievably strong ensemble cast and waited things out until Deschanel and Jess were able to return; something that's really great about "New Girl" is that you can pair the characters up in almost any combination and it still works. Despite all of this, though, the show "replaced" Jess with a new roommate: Reagan, played by Megan Fox.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Fox's Reagan is really funny, and a ridiculously hot bombshell proves to be a great foil for an increasingly horned-up and desperate Nick and Winston. (Reagan's presence also helps build out Cece's character a little bit, as it reveals that the two women had a romantic entanglement years prior.) Nick and Reagan's romantic storyline, though, feels like an irritating retread of Nick's journey with Jess — which, of the two, is the clear endgame anyway — and the excuse that Jess is sequestered for "jury duty" is just, well, stupid. Still, at the risk of repeating myself, even the "worse" seasons of "New Girl" have some gems; "The Decision" is a standout episode where Reagan pits Winston and Nick against one another for her affection, and Schmidt and Cece's wedding in the season 5 finale is genuinely sweet.

Let me get this out of the way: the second episode of season 6 of "New Girl," titled "Hubbedy Bubby," focuses entirely on Jess and Cece volunteering for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, and it has aged like milk left in a hot car for an entire summer. If you skip that episode during your rewatch, though, season 6 of "New Girl" is perfectly fine! There's a genuinely delightful crossover with "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," a fellow Fox comedy (at that point), partway through the season, and now that Schmidt and Cece are finally married, they start building their lives together, complete with a rundown house deeply in need of renovations that they dub "Jaipur Aviv" to honor their Indian and Jewish heritages. (This is, unsurprisingly, Schmidt's idea.) 

There's a lot going on in this season of "New Girl," actually — Reagan comes back and leaves again, Schmidt's dad (introduced in season 5 and played by Peter Gallagher) flits in and out of episodes from time to time, and in one of the show's most twisted and funny plotlines, Jess and her admittedly lame boyfriend Robby (Nelson Franklin) discover that they're related after they've already been in a relationship for a while. All of this mess ultimately course-corrects at the end of season 6 when Jess and Nick get together for good — heralded by a kiss in their building's elevator set to "Green Light" by Lorde — but up until that point, season 6 of "New Girl" is decidedly jumbled but still fun.

Right from the start of season 4 of "New Girl," we know we're off to a strong start when the whole gang attends a wedding — the site of so many shenanigans on this particular show. Jess, who's been experiencing a romantic dry spell, sets her sights on the ceremony's most eligible bachelor Ted ("Veep" standout Reid Scott), but she has to face off against the insanely beautiful and accomplished Kat (Jessica Biel), while the guys find their own reasons to flounder; I actually can't believe that this is followed by an episode where Cece, Nick, and Coach eat a ton of weed brownies before going to a party with Winston's fellow police cadets and lose their ever-loving minds. I'll stop going episode by episode or we'll be here all week, but the episode immediately after that introduces Kaitlin Olson as Ashley Berkman, Jess' high school bully and Bob Day's new much-younger fiancée. What more could you even ask for from three half-hour episodes? 

The rest of season 4 of "New Girl" stays strong and doesn't let up, from a phenomenal cameo by future "Reacher" star Alan Ritchson (as a guy who seems perfect but is ... maybe lacking in some areas), a crackerjack guest arc from TV veteran Zoe Lister-Jones as city councilwoman Fawn Moscato (who loves saying her own name), and a turn from British actor Julian Morris as Jess' colleague turned boyfriend Ryan Geauxinue. (Say that out loud with a French intonation. You'll get it.) Season 4 of "New Girl" is legitimately good, but it's still, appropriately, in fourth place. That's how great this show is!

Season 3 of "New Girl" is the one where Prince guest stars in an episode, which automatically catapults this installment to the top third of this list. It doesn't have the strongest start — Nick and Jess absconding to Mexico to live without responsibilities is funny on paper but is just sort of tiresome in practice — but more than makes up for that with standout episodes like "Keaton" (where it's revealed that Schmidt has been sending Nick fake letters "written by Michael Keaton" for literal decades) and "Exes," which features guest turns from Mary Elizabeth Ellis and Adam Brody. Also, again, Prince guest-stars in the post-Super Bowl episode "Prince," where the gang ends up at Prince's house party, he helps Jess and Nick say "I love you" for the first time, and performs. It is ... amazing.

Beyond that, we get to learn more about some of the gang's family structures — Linda Cardellini is particularly funny as Abby, Jess' erratic and chaotic sister who rolls into town and immediately seduces Schmidt — and speaking of Schmidt, this is the season where he tries to date both Cece and his beloved college girlfriend Elizabeth (the always perfectly cast Merritt Wever) at the same time before his whole gambit falls apart. By the end of season 3, the whole gang ends up on an unbelievably doomed cruise, and the ending of that journey — Nick and Jess announce their breakup before they all get locked in one cruise cabin for multiple days — is classic "New Girl" nonsense in the best possible way.

Sometimes comedies stumble in their first seasons — "30 Rock" and "Parks and Recreation" are prime examples of this — but "New Girl," miraculously, gets a running start. After finding her loser boyfriend Spencer (Ian Wolterstorff) with another woman, Jess realizes she needs to move and, like I said, finds the loft ... but she turns out to be kind of a bad roommate when she spends all of her time watching "Dirty Dancing" in the living room, crying, and drinking pink wine. The end of the pilot sees Nick, Schmidt, and Coach deciding to befriend Jess and adopt her into their gang, and when Winston joins the fun and Coach leaves, they become a solid foursome (fivesome when you add Cece into the mix).

The best thing about season 1 of "New Girl" is that the characters — Nick and Schmidt, in particular — feel incredibly lived-in and developed, as if they've existed long before we even met them, and that's a huge part of what makes the entirety of "New Girl" so great. Beyond that important structural framework, the inaugural season of "New Girl" brings exciting guest stars like Lizzy Caplan, Ryan Kwanten, Justin Long, and Dermot Mulroney into the mix (the latter of whom reappear from time to time throughout the series as two of Jess' love interests). Thanks to the fact that it has sharp dialogue and great chemistry between its lead actors, "New Girl" is a rare comedy that's strong right out of the gate, but there's still one season of the series that looms above all the rest.

The infamous game known as True American is introduced in season 1 of "New Girl," but it reaches its apex in the season 2 episode "Cooler" — and this is just one of several highlights to be found in the very best season of "New Girl." Season 2 of "New Girl" is the show at its funniest and most free after a successful first outing, letting all of its characters get considerably funnier and weirder without sacrificing who they are; True American, a game only played in the central loft with inscrutable rules that may or may not be centered around American history, is a pretty perfect example of this. (You start the game by counting to three, yelling "JFK!" and "FDR!" and shotgunning a beer and it devolves from there, so if anybody wants to play True American with me, please hit me up.)

Okay, I'll stop praising True American — even if I do think it's the greatest fictional game in TV history, with apologies to the Cones of Dunshire from "Parks and Recreation" — because there's so much to talk about in season 2 of "New Girl." Between episodes like "Pepperwood" (where a suspicious Nick thinks one of Jess' adult creative writing students is a murderer) to "Menzies" (where all the guys develop PMS symptoms along with Jess) and guest stars like Olivia Munn, Carla Gugino, and Brenda Song, season 2 is just hit after hit after hit ... and it all culminates in Cece's attempt to wed her arranged fiancé Shivrang (Satya Bhabha), only to be interrupted by the smooth sounds of "Cotton-Eyed Joe," a badger falling from the air vents, and an interruption from Shivrang's ex-girlfriend Elaine (guest star Taylor Swift). You should watch all of "New Girl" in order, but be sure to savor season 2.

"New Girl" is streaming on Hulu now.