Despite star Jake Johnson teasing that the show’s recent season finale would be the kind of ending that the show’s fans would approve of, Fox’s New Girl has been renewed for a seventh and final season. This comes from Deadline, which says this decision pretty much came down to the wire, with less than a day to go before Fox was set to finalize its 2017-2018 TV schedule for advertisers. We don’t have specifics yet, but Deadline predicts that this will be a shortened season for New Girl, presumably coming in at 13 episodes instead of the usual 22.
That’s probably for the best, though, since New Girl seemed to make a dedicated effort last season to either tie up plot threads or send characters on a path toward some form of show-ending growth. Johnson’s Nick and Zooey Deschanel’s Jess are getting back together, Cece and Schmidt are having a baby, and Winston made the first move in fixing his relationship with his father. So, when the show comes back, it’ll presumably be for more of a victory lap than for more protracted will-they-won’t-they drama—not that the constant will-they-won’t-they teases haven’t been fun for these last few years.
As Deadline notes, New Girl came out of the gate with dynamite ratings, and though the numbers quickly dipped after Fox had to push the show back to make room for the baseball playoffs—an annual event that the network never seems ready for—it still remained Fox’s highest-rated live-action comedy for its entire run.