I've watched 1,341,044 seconds of New Girl, and for those of you without a calculator, that’s 373 hours—the equivalent of 15 and a half days of my life spent watching New Girl.
Over the years, I watched the show when I was bored, depressed, giddy, or craving nostalgia. New Girl aired from 2011 to 2018, situating it right at the center of my coming-of-age. I first watched the show on Netflix in the summer before I went to high school, and by the time it ended, I had just graduated. It informed me about the world as I was first opening up to it.
In the graph above, each bar represents the number of episodes or movies I watched each month since I made my own profile on my family’s Netflix. The colors represent different New Girl seasons. According to Netflix data, on July 26, 2014, at 2:43 in the morning, I watched the pilot for the first time. Since then, each time I begin watching season one, I consider it the start of a rewatch—totaling eight watches of the series in just under eight years.
So, why do I keep rewatching New Girl?
New Girl is a perfect example of a TV genre I like to call “Happy White People.” Think Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, and the Big Bang Theory—the shows’ casts aren’t exclusively white, but many of the main characters are. They get stuck in quirky light-hearted snares, which apart from the occasional two-part episode, exist in self-contained 22-minute blips.
I don’t watch these shows because they're my favorite genre. Don’t get me wrong, I love the wacky happenings of apartment 4D, as do so many others. I’ve had countless conversations about whether Jess and Nick should have ended up together, the utter adorableness of Winston, and what in the world I need to do to get a Schmidt in my life. But my favorite shows challenge me—they allow me to interrogate parts of myself through the fictional lenses of their characters. Whether it’s their jobs, backgrounds, fashion sense, or stressors, I see myself in their protagonists. For New Girl, despite wanting to—and trust me I really want to—I can’t.
There are no recurring Black women protagonists in New Girl (or Friends or How I Met Your Mother or Modern Family or The Big Bang Theory). While race and gender aren’t the only way to connect with characters on TV, it surely helps. Beyond physical characters, the impossibility of their lives continues. They live in apartments and homes that look like mansions compared to my apartment. They have ambiguous jobs, but always seem to find the money to pay for their adventures.
I turn it on and I get this fuzzy feeling. It’s the same feeling you get when you're playing pretend as a child. A break where I can be someone whose biggest issue is the cute boy across the hall. I get to stop thinking about myself, my place in the world, and the systems and structures that make things difficult.
I crave that impossibility. It's tantalizing, addicting even. Growing up in white spaces, going to white schools, watching lots of “happy white people”, I’ve been conditioned to see that life as ideal, something worth striving for. I know these lives are fictional and that I’ll never reach fantasy. I am well aware that some overpaid producer is packaging content they know I’ll like and I’m falling for the bit.
In these fictional worlds, people like me barely exist. Perhaps I should miss them, demand the representation I so rightfully deserve. Sitcoms with that representation do exist—Black-ish, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Everyone Hates Chris to name a few—and I’ve watched and loved many of them. But there are only so many and they're only so happy. More often than not, non-white shows are left with the responsibility of representing the real world. Meanwhile “Happy White People” dominate our steaming space.
Consciously I know it’s not a problem that I crave the nonsense of “happy white people”, but sometimes I feel guilty for liking it—like I’m opting out of interrogating and thinking about my own life.
But then the next episode comes on, and I laugh or smile and remember maybe it’s not my responsibility to interrogate my life constantly.
love the graph!
love the graph