New Girl, "Swuit" (4.15) - TV Review

New Girl, Season 4, Episode 15, “Swuit”

Tuesday, February 3, 2015 9pm FOX

I KNEW they were setting up Kai and Nick to break up. If this review were a courtroom, I would ask you to bring up my last review where I said the writers were potentially setting the scene for Kai to break up with Nick over his new found ambition. And it happened! I’d like to think I know the show so well, at this point I can anticipate its every move, or maybe I’m just a witch. I’m probably a witch.

After the last episode, where Schmidt and Nick decide to go into business together, they create “Schnick Industries”. Their first contribution to the consumer world - a sweat suit, a Swuit, which they pitch to Shark Tank’s Lori Greiner. Needless to say, it doesn’t go over well. I mean, have you seen the swuit? The idea of the swuit, is smartly used to explore Nick and Schmidt’s history together, and friendship. We learn that they like to lie in bed together and talk about their day, they’ve been living together for a decade, and even though they may be growing apart, they’re doing it together. The fact that their relationship is clearly more important than Nick’s romantic relationship shows with the off-screen break up from Kai. To be fair, they sort of lumped them together in the first place, and she, like Jess’s beau Ryan, was just sort of there, on-screen. Never fully allowing you to get emotionally invested in it. As we shouldn’t be, because even though the writers backpedaled on the seriousness of Jess and Nick’s pairing this season, their chemistry and trumped every other pairing on the show thus far, and it’s definitely an ace up their sleeve to play at a later date, if they get it right.

Winston, Coach and Cece’s story line - tonight we had a good ol’ “classic Winston-Coach mess-around”. Cece is having trouble paying her college tuition. Something I’m so happy the writers have included. As a female adult, working at a bar and living on her own, of course she would have financial issues. She’s too embarrassed to tell Jess, partly because she knows Jess would help her in an instant. So she goes to Winston and Coach. They decide to pool their money and loan it as “an investment”. But when they realize it’s a “bad investment”, Cece is enrolled in Liberal Arts, which provides absolutely nothing useful, they turn into parents, pressuring her to take something more directional. But like all meddling parents, they soon realize that they want their pseudo-daughter to be happy, and tell her “whatever drawings you talk about, always shoot for the stars”.

The episode ends very Happy Endings-esque, with the gang playing some Bachman-Turner-Overdrive to cheer up Nick, in a public place where no stranger appreciates the group’s actions.

[The Round-up]