Winston Loves Fruity Drinks

New Girl, S02E01

Nick, Winston, Schmidt and Jess returned Tuesday night back in full comedy action!  Jess was fired from her job and did her best to hide how much it devastated her.  Schmidt threw a rebranding party to celebrate the removal of his penis cast.

This was a great episode to start things off.  I was just glad to see things back to normal (after Nick almost left the group last season) with everyone acting crazy.  Of course, with Jess losing her job it seemed that this event might mess up their whole dynamic, but really it's all about Jess acting a-fool in the most awkward way, and she had no problems doing that while unemployed.  My favorite thing, actually, about her getting fired is when she selected a tiny silver glitter hat from the lost and found box.  Nick hated it and tossed it away at one time, but Jess brought it back when she was attempting to do a sexy shot-girl dance toward the end.  But it was nice to see that she didn't give up on being a teacher.  I think that her childlike qualities and weirdness are best suited for dealing with kids, so I wouldn't want to see Jess in a different occupation.  Hopefully she can just get another education-related job, preferably one that causes more situations like that hilarious science fair fiasco from last season.

The best thing about the episode had to do with Winston, although Schmidt's fire dancing that he couldn't quite control wasn't bad either.  Before the party where we saw Winston acting crazy over some fruity drink, there was a good quote between him and Schmidt:

[Winston] I'm a changed man.  I mean, look at me--I'm wearing a suit.
[Schmidt] A suit?  Please, that's something they put on Morgan Freeman when they let him out of Shawshank.

But that was nothing compared to Winston from the first time he took a sip from Nick's special fruity drink.  I don't know if you want to call it drunk or if a special switch had been turned on inside him, but Winston was acting as fruity as the drink he was inhaling at that party.  Nick warned us beforehand that Winston was going to get weird, but he went beyond what I even expected--it was so funny!  Him talking about being "naughty" and his facial expressions just killed me.  I think that Winston sometimes ends up being the funniest now because he's the one who usually stands in the background around all the crazy doings of his roommates, so when he actually falls out of line and starts "joining the party," it tends to be so freaking funny.  My only complaint was that the focus was so much on Schmidt and Cece and Jess' unemployment that there wasn't so much time to see Winston under the spell of his most favorite cocktail.  However, I can't be too mad because there was this great scene where Winston stared at Schmidt's fire dancing while twisting a straw in his mouth:

This was probably one of the best Winston scenes of all time and it was in the first episode!  It's times like this that I can't believe that I didn't like Winston at all.  He's the wildcard on the show, where everyone is pretty unstable to begin with.

This episode would have been fine to start with on its own, but FOX gave us a bonus episode last week to enjoy as well!  But this one was good enough that I couldn't possibly be unsatisfied whether the next one was just as good or not!  It's great to have New Girl back on the air again!