Should the handcrafted portmanteau of "adorkable" not sufficiently encapsulate the way Fox's Zooey Deschanel sitcom New Girl has wrapped your heart in ice cream cone-adorned flannel pajamas, allow executive producer Brett Baer to offer an alternative theory as to why so many viewers have snuggled up to the show for a platonic sleepover. "I was thinking long and hard about it, and I said to Dave [Finkel, fellow executive producer], 'What we've done here is created maybe the first post-post-9/11 show,'" Baer says to the WGA magazine Written By, as well as a still-cowering populace who's finally staggering blinking into the sunshine, then doing a goofy little dance totally unselfconsciously.
"The comedy in the past 10 years prior to our show had an edge to it. It was satirical. There was a cynicism about the comedy," Baer adds, thus differentiating New Girl from the Swiftian morbidity that has characterized series such as Modern Family and Parks And Recreation, which trade in the blackly hollow laughs born of the paralytic horror of terrorist attacks. Baer concludes, "What our show came along at the right time for—this weird alchemy that happened—is that we were willing for the first time to go, It's okay to feel again." ("Is it okay to feel again?" a tremulous, wide-eyed nation asks Siri, to which she proudly avers, "Yes, it looks like it’s okay to feel again.") Indeed, it's been a long 11 years, but the tiny porcelain hand of Zooey Deschanel has finally pulled us from the ashes. [via Vulture]