After six seasons, it seems like Jess, Winston, Schmidt and Nick may finally be shipping out of that loft they proooobably should have given up some time ago.
Jake Johnson, who plays New Girl’s charmingly stunted Nick Miller, told the Daily Beast that the show is almost certainly “done” following its sixth season finale, airing on April 4.
“Fox won’t tell us [whether the show will be renewed],” he said. “But we shot a finale where, if this was the end, the core fan base would be OK.”
Uncertainty is par for the course for actors working on a long-running series like this one, but it’s hard for laypeople like me to imagine living with your career’s future so thoroughly out of your own hands, lashed instead to the whims of network bosses. The show’s creator, Liz Meriwether, also has no idea what to expect, telling the Beast, “I genuinely don’t know! Fingers crossed.”
But six years is a good run, and besides, the fabric of the show’s logic was starting to shine at the elbows: I still refuse to believe that two people like Nick and Jess, whose brief relationship was by all accounts basically happy, could just casually split up and then continue to live peacefully in the same weird apartment. No screaming? No regrets? No multiple ill-fated reunions? No passive-aggressive hostility over the bathroom? Please.
Viewership has also fallen steadily since the show premiered in 2011, when its pilot was viewed by more than 10 million people. Season five, though, averaged just under 4 million viewers per episode, and the season six premiere had just over 2 million. Meriwether has in the past attributed the numbers to viewers watching it later, but I suspect it’s more that the premise has simply played itself out. After all, Winston and his phantasmagoric shirt collection can’t carry the show forever.