New Girl’s Other Girl Problem: How Cece and Lots of Supporting Ladies on TV Basically Became Paper Dolls

I know it’s not called New Girls–and I know the theme song is very clear about who that girl is. But I think the time has come: we need to talk about Cece.

New Girl is a show that, in my mind, is nearly perfect. The writing is so true and sharp. The stories are silly enough to feel like escapism but always grounded in something straight out of the past six months of your life. And, with less than two seasons under their belt, the show has made us feel like we’ve known these characters for a decade–that’s how well all of their outlooks, quirks and backstories have already been fleshed out (in the case of Fat Schmidt, literally).

All but one, that is.

Cece has long been the one nagging misgiving in the back of my New Girl fangirl mind. There’s a clear physical boundary between her and the rest of the gang–she doesn’t live with them. None of the everyday stuff that goes on in that den of broken-in leather–the flirtation, the unreliable plumbing, the crappy-day-mending–touches Cece.

And yet she’s written into most moments of reflective group bonding. Handy rule: if there’s sand, there’s Cece. She crashed on the beach with the loft-dwellers, and she closed out season one with them in the desert. When she was devastated by her fertility issues earlier this year–and when she made the concentrated decision to settle down–it felt like we were picking up momentum.

But then we’d rubber band right back into small-time Cece territory, which usually entails her just waiting. Waiting for Jess to need a face to whine into, or waiting for Schmidt to show up and emotionally paw at her. I feel like ninety percent of Cece’s screen time involves her either opening a door or waiting behind one–and it’s rarely what she wants that’s brought her there.

Last night’s episode literally shone rainbow-colored disco lights on this soft spot [spoilers are nigh]. A proposal? Come on. Forget that, yes, this is a modern-day arranged marriage–which still doesn’t compensate for how hastily this materialized. Forget that it’s probably going to fall apart within the next three episodes. Just think about this: have you ever seen a proposal episode before where the bride-about-to-be kicked off the 20 minute chunk of television by playing a quiet, nodding ponytail to her friend, who’s been analyzing the same kiss for a month?

I think the most believable part of the whole thing was when Jess took cover from a crying man in a food tent instead of running over to her newly-engaged best friend. When they finally bumped into each other, it was all “Jess?” “Hey!”–which is about right, based on the level of girl friendship we’ve been successfully sold here. (At least Jess put down the dinner roll she’d been engrossed in, I guess.) How fitting, too, that the mic wasn’t even cold on Shrivang’s proposal when a one-episode fling of Jess’s stole the moment’s thunder.

Unsurprisingly, the real revelation out of this whole development was: Schmidt’s sadness at the development. We didn’t see Cece having an internal freakout somewhere off to the side. We didn’t see the happy couple celebrating together. Jess asked, “This is good, right?” Cece answered, “It’s good!” It was all very efficient, and afforded us more time later to look at the rest of the characters in a hot air balloon, built for four.

New Girl isn’t the only show on television facing this problem. It’s not even the only show on television that I love that doesn’t know what to do with its supporting female leads. Flat secondary girls seem to have become the long-term fallout from leading ones.

Two years ago, we were all cheering the network’s sudden urge to put shows led by women all over TV: New Girl, GIRLS, Whitney, 2 Broke Girls, Don’t Trust the B in Apt. 23, Are You There, Chelsea?. It seemed like the biggest problem we’d have was keeping all the lady-synonym titles straight. Now, Are You There, Chelsea? and Apt. 23 are gone. Whitney, which made it clear from the beginning that its very funny ensemble actresses were second to the central couple’s spats, is likely to follow. We complain about the uneven screen-time on GIRLS more or less every week at this point. Though its spray-cheese sex jokes are nowhere close to real female dialogue (apologies to anyone who actually does communicate to their friends solely through penis puns), 2 Broke Girls is the only show of this crop that charts the journey of more than one woman every single week.

I truly don’t know why that is–especially when the excitement that initially surrounded these shows stemmed just as much from the fact that women were running them, not just starring in them. Maybe it’s a network note. Maybe it’s that the show’s chemistry has progressed differently than originally imagined. But even great shows, these days, don’t have the luxury to take their sweet time figuring out whom we should care about.

The Mindy Project sensed that Anna Camp and Amanda Setton weren’t working and immediately weeded them out. Cuts like that might feel abrupt for an episode or two, but they actually fulfill a TV show’s end of its one necessary promise to its audience: you invest in our characters, we’ll move them forward or backward each week. New Girl needs to decide if it wants to be this:

Or this:

Because girl-driven, friendship-driven shows aren’t really that if the girl friendships aren’t there. We shouldn’t feel like we’re watching one long, serialized version of the expression “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” come to life. Especially when the bridesmaid is the actual bride.

Does this bother you, too?

Photo: FOX