'New Girl' Preview: Creator Liz Meriwether Plans a Wedding

Save the date! New Girl is back, and the new season is all about the wedding. The Season 5 premiere of the hit Fox sitcom kicked off with Schmidt (Max Greenfield) down on one knee — to ask Nick (Jake Johnson) to be his best man! Cece’s (Hannah Simone) mom flew in from India for the engagement party (spoiler alert: a Bollywood dance troupe and a too-white groom do not make this wedding OK in Big Mama P’s eyes), and that’s just the beginning of what promises to be a roller coaster of a season on Fox’s longest-running live-action comedy series.

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Ahead of the new season, Yahoo TV talked to New Girl creator and showrunner Liz Meriwether to find out what we can expect for the roomies in Season 5, and we also got the scoop on how she handled star Zooey Deschanel’s real-life maternity leave. “I think the wedding is a good framework for the season,” Meriwether tells us. “A lot of preparation for the wedding, and then sort of all the craziness of planning a wedding, especially with this group of people.”

So, we will see Schmidt and Cece’s wedding this season?
Yes.

Will we learn Schmidt’s first name in the wedding vows?
You know, we’re still talking about it, but there’s a real strong possibility. I think that’s what we’re talking about.

How did you handle Zooey’s maternity leave?
We filmed the first four episodes of Season 5 before she had the baby, and then she doesn’t come back again until Episode 10. So she’s in Episodes 1 through 3 and then she’s back in Episode 10. So she’s missing, she’s not there, for six episodes.

Wow. How do you explain that?
Well, we never discuss it. We just hope the audience won’t notice. [Laughs.] No, she gets sequestered on a jury, on a celebrity jury, so she can’t contact them or do anything. So there’s different ways we try to keep her spirit alive over the course of the episodes. And then Megan Fox moves in for five episodes. She sublets Jess’s room, so there’s an arc with Megan Fox’s character.

OK, so what can you tell us about Megan’s character?
She’s kind of this tough pharmaceutical rep that travels a lot and isn’t used to making roots or making friends with people, and she’s kind of this great foil for our kind of band of weirdos. It’s fun in the fifth season to bring in a character that doesn’t know anybody’s history, doesn’t know any baggage, and can kind of, like, see through everything and tell them when they’re being idiots. It’s been a really funny dynamic to shoot, with her kind of picking them apart a little bit, which I feel like they kind of deserve and need sometimes.

Damon Wayons Jr. (Coach) exited the show, but I heard it might be more of a “see you later” with him, like he might turn up again sometime. Any chance we’ll see him this season?
Right now we’re kind of figuring out if he can come to the wedding, which would be great. And the other really big guest star is Peter Gallagher as Schmidt’s dad, which we’re really excited about. In all of the wedding planning, Schmidt’s dad sort of starts to become a bigger part of his life later on in the season. And Nasim Pedrad plays Winston’s [Lamorne Morris] partner. He’s a cop, so she’s his partner, and there’s another kind of fun arc this season with their romance growing, the difficulties of Winston making a move on any girl. He’s falling in love and he’s trying to make that work. And she’s been great, we love Nasim so much. She’s really, really funny and fits in so well with the group.

Do you have anything special planned for the show’s 100th episode milestone?
We talked about it, and yes we do. It feels like just another episode, but it’s the episode when Jess comes home from jury duty and she meets Megan Fox for the first time. So that’s the episode where Jess and Megan are in the same episode. It’s the episode where she comes home.

Jake Johnson said in an interview that he thinks the show works better when Nick and Jess aren’t together because it’s such an ensemble show. Do you agree with that?
I think it works both ways. I think for where we are right now in the series, it’s working great without them together, and then I don’t think, for me, the end game has always been Jess and Nick. So we’re just kind of trying to feel out what the natural path that their relationship would take and figure out why their relationship didn’t work while they were dating, and then ways that the two characters can grow and change and make better… You know, the reasons why a relationship wouldn’t work at one time in their lives and what would have to change in order to make their relationship work again, and so we’re trying to take those two characters on those paths.

Have we seen the last of the sex mug?
Is that, like, a loaded question? [Laughs.] I think we have not seen the last of the sex mug. And I mean that in every possible way.

New Girl airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on Fox.