'New Girl' Season 1, Episode 7 Recap - 'Bells'

This week on "New Girl," we learned that Jess plays the hand bells. No one is surprised. Yet another instance of how well Liz Meriweather knows this character.

The bells come into play as Jess takes her troubled youth (avoiding detention by playing hand bells for Jess) into the apartment to practice.

There Jess discovers that Winston is a hand bell prodigy, creating symphonies on his own, three bells in each hand. It's pretty awesome. It's less awesome, though, when Winston tries to get the kids to play "Eye of the Tiger" and they can't follow along, so he yells at them.

But Jess and Winston aren't the only ones fighting. Nick and Schmidt get into a spat over item ownership after Schmidt complains about Nick's fix for the toilet (it involves a Mountain Dew bottle. That's all I know). Nick can't pull off the "fancy fix," so Schmidt calls the plumber, which insults Nick. He then gets on Schmidt's case for being born rich, and un-fixes a number of things around the house. Schmidt retaliates by banning Nick from using anything that Schmidt bought.

Well, that explains how they can all afford to live in this huge, trendy apartment in Los Angeles when two of them are unemployed and one's a public school teacher. Schmidt's rich.

Schmidt and Nick's argument turns out to be a lot more interesting, as it comes down to Schmidt blurting out "You chose to drop out of law school. You chose to be a loser." Ouch, man. S**t just got real.

Everything turns out just fine, of course, and Winston even performs in the bell recital. And Schmidt wears his cardigan.

But the beginning of this episode was a bit troubling: the usual laugh-out-loud jokes were not there, and there were very few of them as the episode went on, too. Jess' cute quirks are becoming the norm, and when that happens, they're not jokes anymore. They're just her character. When we adjust to that, the danger of making her broader, bigger, more quirky may be there. Hopefully (and I have faith) Liz Meriweather is clever enough to avoid that particular pitfall.

Line-o-Rama:

-"Repeat after me: I am not the Chinese kid from 'The Goonies.'"

-"Who drinks Midori Sour?"

-"When you speak, all I hear is 'cardigan, cardigan, I'm wearing a cardigan.'"