Heroine: Jess Day

As a person who is cool enough to read this blog (!), I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with the show New Girl – if not, sort that out. It is one of my all time favourite shows, and up there with the best sitcoms ever (The US Office, Spaced, Frasier, Seinfeld, to name a few).

It stars the ever-charming Zooey Deschanel as the subject of today’s post: Jess Day. When the show starts Jess is presented a ‘quirky’, goofy girl who moves in with three random guys after her boyfriend cheats on her and she needs a new place to live. The dynamic of the gruff guys and cutesy Jess is what drives the early episodes, but obviously things develop and grow over time and you see that really they are all just as weird and nutty as each other – and it makes an AMAZING show.

I’m probably not selling it very well, but I promise it’s great. The storylines are well constructed and satisfying, and it is one of the shows that makes me actually laugh out loud the most. There’s an episode where Jess is embarrassed to say the word ‘penis’ and I spent several minutes texting all the phrases she used to my fiancé because they were just so funny.

Anyway, my point was to talk about Jess – and how awesome she is. The image at the top of this post is from an episode Jess clashes with a girlfriend of Nick’s, Julia, because Julia thinks Jess is too girly and sweet, and doesn’t think she can be taken seriously. Julia accuses Jess of having a ‘thing’, an act that she uses to be cute and get her way. The moment when Jess defends herself is just brilliant and made me realise why I love Jess – she is both girly and fun, and wears super amazing dresses, but she is tough and smart and deals with a lot of stuff. She is also brave – the whole premise of the show is that she is thrown into this new situation and has to deal with it as best she can. She’s unafraid to be weird, emotional, demanding, sad, or just really damn happy. Jess knows who she is and she doesn’t hide it from anyone.

This episode with Julia (which is season 1, episode 11, “Jess and Julia”) is also great because it highlights the intricacies of female friendships – Jess’s friends Cece and Sadia (I wish Sadie was in more episodes!) completely understand the conflict between Jess and Julia, but the guys just don’t. The girls get that they have clashed because they are just very different types of girl, and they clearly have very different outlooks and ways of doing things. It doesn’t matter that they haven’t actually done anything bad to each other (aside from a bit of cattiness) – the conflict already exists. The even better part comes later in the episode when Julia comes over to see Nick, feeling down, and Nick isn’t there but Jess invites her in anyway and she sits and crochets with the other girls. They bond in their own way, over the knowledge of the fact that even though they are very different types of girl, they are still both girls, and this is a particular experience. In a way, they get each other.

Another thing I personally love about Jess is her wardrobe, including her adorable pyjamas. If you do a Google image search for Jess Day, you’ll get a whole host of her outfits, with links to where people have sourced the dresses that she wears in certain episodes. Jess wears more bright colours than me (I live in black, grey, and navy) but I love the 1960s feel to her outfits and the fact that she always looks comfortable, as well as looking attractive and well put together. She also wears tights a lot, which I do too, and a surprisingly small amount of female TV characters wear tights these days! Plus she has great hair.

I will stop rambling now. I love Jess Day, and New Girl in general. How about you?