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Is New Girl Secretly The Same Show As Friends?
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Mar 31, 2025
Friends will forever be seen as the quintessential primetime sitcom. During its run, it was by far the most popular show on TV, and paved the way for countless other shows copying the format to match its success. Show like How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory definitely succeeded, but both made the format their own. New Girl however, had great success sticking almost too close to the format set by Friends. New Girl and Friends aren't carbon copies, but there are more than enough similarities to prove where New Girl got its inspiration.
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Pivot! Pivot! Pivot
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Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! This is Friends, a beloved 90s three-camera sitcom about six friends in their 20s living in New York City
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becoming romantically involved and engaging in quintessential sitcom hijinks. Do you guys think that the cops are gonna go through our stuff
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What are you afraid of? Curtains? What, did you steal a kiss and hide it in an envelope? I have a bag of meth in my closet
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And this is New Girl, a sitcom from the 2010s about four friends in their 20s living in Los Angeles, becoming romantically involved and engaging in quintessential sitcom hijinks
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Is New Girl secretly the same show as Friends? Yes, but the reason might surprise you
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The 90s had a specific tone to the sitcoms that were produced during that time
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Yes, the standard odd couple dynamics were on full display, but overall, the shows produced focused on appealing to the slacker mentality attributed to Gen X youths of the day
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Shows about dead-end jobs, friend groups with no real ambition, and people just struggling to keep their head above water became the norm
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The comedy within these shows took on a very, yeah, that's cool, shrugfest vibe
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Friends created by David Crane and Marta Kaufman both played into these tropes
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but also made them palatable to a wide audience by layering them with a sugary coating of broad comedy
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attractive actors, and a heaping serving of earnestness. The show ran for 10 seasons, became the most popular program on TV
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and propelled its six leads into cultural icons. And then 9-11 happened, and America changed forever
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Post-September 11th, Americans didn't want to see earnestness and popcorn narratives. The comedy that they accepted and heralded as great from that point on fell into one of two camps
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Acidically sarcastic or so light and fluffy that it basically had no connection to reality anymore
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Look at the massive success of Curb Your Enthusiasm or Arrested Development had during the 2000s
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They're cut from a different cloth. Instead of punchlines, it was more about snide comments regarding social faux pas
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Did I notice a log cabin Republican in the parking lot? Was that you? Did you let that one in, Ken
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and mismatched attire. On the flip side, you have according to Jim
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or the rules of engagement, What I Like About You, or Reba. All of these shows just came and went They were so bland they didn leave a mark Furthermore all of these sarcastic or dry shows tended to be single camera as in a show that filmed like a movie with a subjective
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one-camera style as opposed to multi-cam shows recorded in front of a live studio audience
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The rise in popularity of these single camera shows could be attributed to technology becoming
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more affordable, and also the fact that Americans post 9-11 were more self-centered. We were more
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concerned with what we were experiencing and less concerned about the experience of others
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Multicam shows are a communal experience. Single cameras tend to reinforce individual experience
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even just on a meta level. A multicamera show is broader, inherently. It's more like a cousin
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to theater. There's a large studio audience and they laugh when we're supposed to laugh
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They act as a guardrail for us, but a single camera show is more of an authorial perspective
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The audience is being placed in the perspective of a single character. You could take the same
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story and film it as a multi-camera show and then a single camera show, and it would feel 180 degrees
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different. Is this era of network sitcom shows literally a reaction to September 11, 2001
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No, of course not, but they're created in the cultural ripple of those events, which formulated
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an American identity that we're still grappling with 20 years later. On paper, Friends and New
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Girl seem pretty similar, but if we take a closer look, it's even more surprising just how much
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overlap there is between the two programs. One of the main reasons why people don't usually notice
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how similar Friends and New Girl are is because of this format. Friends is multi-camera. New Girl
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is single camera. The aesthetic difference that it produces can't be overstated. It makes the shows
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feel different, even when they're ostensibly extremely similar. Our cast spend a majority
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of their time either in their apartments or a central hangout. For Friends, it's the coffee shop
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central perk, for New Girl, it's the bar, the griffin. Jess, played by Zooey Deschanel
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is a girl fresh out of a breakup and seeking a new start, so she moves
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in with some strangers. Rachel, played by Jennifer Aniston, is a girl running
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out on her wedding who moves in with a forlorn friend she hasn't spoken to since high school
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Outside of the protagonist, Friends has a quirky girl in Phoebe, played by Lisa Kudrow. New Girl's weird old
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soul counterpart is Winston, played by Lamorne Morris. They both occupy the same narrative real estate. They're there
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to be the weirdo zany character of the group. Does either show have a sarcastic funny man
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that afraid of commitment eventually overcoming it Yes Chandler played by Matthew Perry in Friends and Nick played by Jake Johnson in New Girl Both Chandler and Nick find success in their careers they find love with
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the type A girl they've pined after, and they settle down and settle into themselves. Then
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there's Monica played by Courtney Cox, a delightfully neurotic clean freak who has a history of losing
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a lot of weight. And then there's definitely not a replica character Schmidt, played by Max
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Greenfield, a delightfully neurotic clean freak who has a history of losing a lot of weight. But
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the similarities don't stop there. The relationships, both romantic and platonic, are the same. The
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guys were college roommates. The girls were friends in high school. The groups merged through the girl
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fresh out of a breakup, moving in with someone else in the group, and subsequently, everyone gets
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introduced. The romantic relationship between Schmidt and Cece, played by Hannah Simone, mirrors
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Monica and Chandler's. A one-night mistake leads to a secret relationship which is found out by the group
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The two get married, have infertility struggles, and eventually children. Nick and Jess are the Ross and
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Rachel paradigm. Both addicting will-they-won't-they storylines. They become a couple for the first time in season
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two, break up, and eventually end up together. These are the same characters with virtually identical
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set pieces going through the same events. If these shows have so many similarities
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Why don't people talk about them more? Aesthetics. Shifting the Friends archetypes and story tropes over to a single camera show
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is the perfect way to mimic one of the most successful sitcoms of all time
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but have it feel completely different. But this is far from the first show to end up working in a similar milieu as Friends
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In fact, both How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory mimicked Friends' high concept and character archetypes considerably
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How I Met Your Mother is Friends in a Bar. Big Bang Theory is friends with nerds, and the difference between these two wildly successful
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shows is that after they initially started as Friends clones, they were able to pull from the
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various character types or subcultures that they were centering on to pivot away from the Friends
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story tropes. While New Girl did the reverse, it started as something unique and distinct
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but quickly adopted the tropes of Friends in order to give its universe a sense of direction
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Creator Elizabeth Meriwether came up with the idea of New Girl based on her college years where she spent time with a group of friends that all shared a large apartment in Brooklyn
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In the produced pilot the show bears almost no resemblance to friends The pilot shows Jess as she finds these new roommates Nick Schmidt and Coach while attempting to move on from a very troubling breakup
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The finale of the episode is the three men putting aside their plans to attend
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a party in order to surprise Jess at a restaurant and serenade her with
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the theme song to Dirty Dancing, after she's been stood up on a date. This might sound like a
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standard sitcom trope, and in many ways it is, it's just unusual
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for the time. After a decade of acidic post-9-11 reactionary comedy, the idea of doing a single-camera show that actually, unironically was heartfelt
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was a very radical thing to do. The show from its inception was wearing its heart on its sleeve
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It was earnest. It was about friendship and attempting to be there for the people in your
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life who need you. And yet it evolved into more codified narrative tropes, many of which were
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borrowed from friends. The heartfelt sincerity that New Girl had played as genuine in the single-camera
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world, whereas if it were acted and produced in the same exact way on a multi-camera show
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the end product would have been vastly different. Was this conscious? It's hard to say, but it's
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pretty obvious that if you're going to be influenced by the idea of taking things in a
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decidedly, more emotionally honest direction, the previous biggest show on earth that tried to craft
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a similar narrative is going to get brought up in the discussion. New Girl doesn't start out as a
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Friends clone show, but it's obviously constructed to be a vehicle for Elizabeth Merriweather's
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quirky sense of humor, and interest in telling emotionally open stories. Over the course of producing nine seasons and a virtual army of writers being incorporated
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into the creative process, people need a North Star. And the easiest solution, whether conscious or not, is to mimic what you've seen work before
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Thus, the character arcs being similar and the will-they-won't-they structure being employed
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the characters' backstories and relationships mirroring each other, It's understandable why these pathways to success are mimicked and regurgitated, but it's the heartfelt sincerity in New Girl's take on all these relationship and narrative tropes that enabled it to be a runaway success
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New Girl replicates friends successfully by using the same ingredients, but adding a different visual language
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This distinct visual style enables all of the characters in New Girl to navigate their interpersonal struggles and kindness and have it not be broad or come across as cheesy
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They bring out the best in their friends and their romantic partners in an aspirational way
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and that's why New Girl is secretly the same show as Friends
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