TV & Movies
Jake Johnson Says New Girl “Fell Off A Cliff” At One Point
The series ran for seven seasons, but Johnson says Hollywood quickly soured on it.
New Girl heartthrob Nick Miller may have set many people’s standards for real-life relationships, but Jake Johnson didn’t always feel that love. In a new interview with Bustle, the actor said New Girl “fell off a cliff” after its first few seasons, which led to some intense criticism.
The Fox series premiered in 2011 to great acclaim and high ratings. “The first season blew up and the second season was huge,” Johnson recalls to Bustle. However, it didn’t take long for Hollywood’s mind to change.
“The town thought it was cool and I was young enough to still care what the town thought,” he says. “All of the sudden you’d be like, ‘Dude, I got invited to the Golden Globes!’ We’d all be like, ‘Dude, that amazing actor just said they watched!’ Then our show fell off a cliff and all those same people stopped liking it.”
Johnson didn’t specify what exactly made the series decline in his opinion. Some fans have argued that New Girl “jumped the shark” after main character Jess returned from “jury duty” (a.k.a. Zooey Deschanel’s maternity leave), while others don’t think the show ever got bad.
Responding To Critics
Despite the shift in opinion, New Girl continued for five more seasons. So while its popularity was enduring, Johnson dealt with jabs from critics and comics, for whom the show became a target.
“Now, when I would go to a cool party and it would be funny comedians, they were ripping on New Girl,” he says. “Like, ‘Oh, Schmidtty and Nick, what are you up to now?’ You’d have to be like, ‘You’re like an alternative comedian, you have a cool beard, and this show’s not a cool dude show. OK.’”
Experiencing criticism of later seasons of New Girl made Johnson want to address it, specifically when it came to anonymous social media trolls who made more harmful and personal comments. So he did start DMing those trolls in response.
“What does this mean, ‘If you saw me, you’d want to punch me in the face’?” he recalls asking. “I would go, ‘My question to you, Steve, is why do you keep watching? … You have so many options, it’s like you’re running down the street and taking a right-hand corner, just to find my stuff.’ They would literally start writing back stuff like, ‘I never thought you were going to read it.’”
Their unexpectedly honest responses allowed Johnson to reach them in an impactful way, saying each DM exchange “would always end in a nice human thing.”
