Completing his ascension from New Girl “guest star” to “special guest star” to “series regular”—and assumedly inheriting his own wedge on the series’ chore wheel—Damon Wayans Jr. will return to the Fox sitcom for the entirety of season four. Multiple sources report that Wayans will stick around the New Girl loft next year, presumably a reward for the shot in the arm/extra joke-telling mouth he provided at the height of the romantic subplot that occupied most of the show’s third season. Or maybe it was because of the time he cleaned up the living room by himself while everybody else was hungover, which was such a cool thing to do and now everyone owes him big time.
In a new take on an old story, Wayans’ renewed commitment to one TV show means he can’t appear on another—a list of prospective jobs that, according to Deadline, included How I Met Your Dad, Sober Companion, and Kevin Hart’s ABC pilot. Knowing New Girl could use someone else to help pay the rent, Fox previously passed on Wayans’ sitcom project with Jason Winer, Man/Child—though, even if it’s working with a year-round schedule, there was never anywhere for the network to put Man/Child, what with so much space already being taken up by Gotham, Mulaney, Backstrom, the Broadchurch remake, all of those episodes of Us & Them the network never took out of the box, and a fifth occupant in the New Girl apartment.