100 New Girl Favorites In Honor of the Show's 100th Episode (Part 1)

Relive the best moments from 100 episodes with Jess, Nick, Schmidt, Winston, Cece, and Coach

By Lauren Piester Mar 08, 2016 11:20 PMTags
Zooey Deschanel, Max Greenfield, New GirlGreg Gayne/FOX

It's a big night for New Girl

Not only does tonight's episode mark the return of Jess after being sequestered on a jury (while Zooey Deschanel was on maternity leave IRL), but it's also the series' 100th episode!

In honor of that milestone, we're compiling our 100 favorite moments, episodes, quotes, guest stars and more. We even hit up the show's 100th episode party to get input from cast members Deschanel, Lamorne Morris, Hannah Simone, and Max Greenfield, as well as creator Liz Meriwether and executive producers Brett Baer and Dave Finkel

And yes, there are 100, and our brains now entirely consist of Nick Miller rants and Schmidt-approved word pronunciations. We've sacrificed our sanity for you, and for that you are welcome.

Check out the first 50 of our favorite moments below, and stay tuned for part two after the episode!

Favorite Episodes

1. "Pilot" (s1e1): Any episode that ends with a Dirty Dancing tribute is a great episode, but since this is the episode introduced us to Jess and her loft full of lovable doofuses, it will always have an especially special place in our hearts.

2. "Normal" (s1e20): We were right there with Russell (Dermot Mulroney) as he first experienced the glory that is True American and was simultaneously horrified and elated by the greatest game ever created. "I remember shooting True American and I remember it being complete chaos and and just finding it in the moment. That was great." —Dave Finkel

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3. "Cooler" (s2e15): One of Dave Finkel's favorite episodes (and ours), "Cooler" not only gave us the Kennedy rules version of True American, but it also gave us what was probably the greatest kiss in the history of TV.  

4. "Injured" (s1e15): "I don't have a favorite episode, but I still really love the cancer scare episode. It was this crazy thing that I'm so happy they let us do, and we went to the beach and kind of took these sort of cool risks and I've always loved that one." —Liz Meriwether 

5. "Virgins" (s2e23): According to Brett Baer, "'Virgins' might be one of our finest. I really do think it's really funny, the performances are great, it ends really great place for Nick and Jess where they finally do it." Plus, we got to watch Jess wait for Dylan O'Brien to get it up in a play castle! 

Favorite Scenes

6. Gave me cookie got you cookie (s2e5): Is there any better representation of the Nick/Schmidt friendship than Nick's frantic desperation to repay his BFF? No, there is not. "What I really love is the Nick/Schmidt love. Their romance is one of my favorite things about the show." —Liz Meriwether

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11. Schmidt's broken penis (s1e22): "Describe it to them as a broken highway cone."
"He was wearing the cast for his [penis] and I told him I wanted to be with him, and he got [an erection] inside the cast and he starts screaming. He screamed so loud in real life that it shocked me and blew my hair back and I didn't know what was happening. He really committed to it, and that made me laugh harder than I have in my entire life. It was the way he screamed in the greatest amount of pain I've ever heard a human being be in, like primal screamed in front of my face." —Hannah Simone

12. The Butt Fight (s1e22): "I have the fastest butt in the land!" We should all try to solve our disagreements with butt fights.  

13. The Panties argument (s3e14): Jess's errant underwear nearly tore the loft apart and succeeded in making us never want to hear the word "panties" again.

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14. Race talk (s4e20): "There's an episode that I wrote called "Par 5", where my character is dealing with Kiersey Clemons. She's protesting police brutality and has all these bad things to say about police officers, and my character's a police officer, so there's a moment where Jake Johnson and I and Damon had a conversation on the couch in the loft about my dilemma, and these two roads that I'm stuck between traveling down. We kind of come up with a solution, and it's mixed with a lot of humor. That's the reason why it's one of my favorites, because it's very dark, not dark, but dramatic and had a lot of intent behind it, but it kind of undercut it with some humor, so that was great."—Lamorne Morris 

15. Nick meets Future Nick (s2e2): We choose to believe that Future Nick is the real deal, and that someday Nick Miller figures out how to time travel.  

Favorite Guest Stars

16. Adam Brody: Jess's ex, stay-at-home hipster dad Berkeley, seemed like a hippie Seth Cohen dream come true…until he told Jess he'd leave his wife for her.

17. Ron Funches: If only we had known at the time how lovable Ron Funches truly is, we would have felt a lot less weird about how much we enjoyed his shirtless, pants-less serenade of "Father Figure." 

18. Fred Armisen: By now we should be used to people turning out to be Fred Armisen in a wig, but somehow he still manages to surprise us.

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Ray Mickshaw/FOX

19. Justin Long: Paul seemed like Jess's perfect match, until Nick ruined everything. Our favorite Paul fact is that he's allergic to felt.

20. Dermot Mulroney: Jess' Fancy Man boyfriend played True American like a true champ and actually might be our favorite of Jess's many exes.

Favorite New Girl Vocab

21. The Douchebag Jar: Schmidt has calmed down so much recently that we haven't seen it in a while, but it used to be the perfect visual summary of everyone else's acceptance of Schmidt's lovable douchery.

22. The Sex Mug: It sounds disgusting, but it's really just a mug that Nick or Jess would leave on the hall table to indicate readiness for sex. It is currently being used as a cat dish.

23. True American: We say greatest drinking game ever, executive producers Brett Baer and Dave Finkel say, "You've played it? That's horrible. That's the most dangerous thing known to man. We're worried for you. Stop!"

24. Chutney: Pronounced Chut-en-y and often accompanied by the sweet scent of mango, that word has been forever changed into something that will always make us giggle.

25. Prank Sinatra: Winston is the absolute worst at pranks, which is just the best. He'll hit your ass with a ski!

Facebook/FOX

Favorite Character Quirks

31. Schmidt's mispronunciation of words: "I like to pick them specifically. Every once in a while they'll come and tell me to mispronounce a word, and I'll go, I would never mispronounce that word. Why would I ever say that incorrectly? But I like to identify them, and then hit them, and they get very upset. Sometimes I'll do it at the table read, and they're like, we just want to hear it." –Max Greenfield

32. Winston's relationship with his cat, Ferguson: "Ferguson is a real son of a bitch. But shows up when he feels like it, the worst breath. My favorite Ferguson scene is when we allude to him but don't show him. I'm just kidding. I just shot an all Ferguson episode this past week, and it was insane. So I'll just say it was when I was trying to get Ferguson laid. That was my favorite Ferguson scene."—Lamorne Morris 

33. Jess can't say the word penis: She also can't say "batmobile" but we all still love her anyway.

34. Schmidt's hatred of Obama: "I'm tickled at his outrage at Obama. That always cracks me up. He really has a bug in his butt about Obama and that makes me laugh." —Brett Baer

35. Nick is secretly a grumpy old man: He might as well just be telling the kids to get off his lawn.

Favorite Quotes

36. "The economy stinks, bees are dying, and movies are pretty much all sequels now." –Schmidt, perfectly summing up life in the 2010s

37. "You were denied a cell phone because you have the credit score of a homeless ghost." –Winston, perfectly summing up Nick Miller

38. "This place is fancy and I don't know which fork to kill myself with." –Nick Miller

39. "I feel like I wanna murder someone. And also I want soft pretzels." –Jess Day

40. "I'm gonna make a cake so moist, girls are gonna be like, ew, why do you say moist? I hate that word, and I'll be like, just taste the cake, and they gonna be like, damn, it's moist." –Coach

41. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? No, a summer's day is not a bitch." –Nick Miller

42. "I've done things. I wrote half a book about zombies." –Nick Miller

43. "He has dreamy eyes. Them's joint bank account eyes." –Jess Day

44. "Take that off! You look like a homeless pencil!" –Schmidt, to Nick about his tracksuit

45. "I want the air that you breathe to be the air coming directly from out of my mouth." –Winston Bishop, ever the romantic

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47. Nick's "dancing": 

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48. Winston crying: 

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49. Winston's polite outrage: 

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50. And Jess, being all of us: 

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Part 2

New Girl's 100th episode airs tonight at 8 p.m. on Fox. 

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