I’ll admit it, I like New Girl. Jess and I watch it on Hulu pretty much every week and generally I think it’s pretty good.

The last episode we watched centered around one of the characters discovering he had a growth on his thyroid. Could it be that he has cancer? All his friends started treating him differently, realizing that he might be dying. In the end he learns his lesson that he’s got to truly live life, he’s got to stop living in fear and start taking some bold steps out of his comfort zone (in this instance… swimming in the ocean). In the end it turns out that he does not have cancer, that it’s just a cyst and that everything is going to be alright. What a surprise?! Hurray!

I just don’t know how I feel about this episode (and I’m fairly certain there are about a dozen other shows that have told the same story). Well, for one, I found it a bit formulaic. There’s just something about it that felt all too simplistic. I get it, it’s a sitcom. Sitcoms should not ever have characters die of cancer unless its a marginal character and is somehow funny (if we can’t laugh at cancer what can we laugh at right?….right?). I sat there watching it, knowing exactly what would happen, knowing exactly what the character and his friends were going to learn, knowing for certain that it would turn out to be nothing.

Hmm…I wish I had a good point. I just felt a need to blog about it because it stirred strange feelings within me as I watched it. Maybe what it all comes down to is that I found the episode…boring. Is that it? Is that all it was? Was my true feeling underneath all this simply the idea that this episode took little to no effort to write? A child could have written this, a novice could have created a storyline where nothing actually happens but the fear of something causes the characters to learn their all too important lesson on life. Yes, maybe that’s it.

And the moral of the story is that I should have been a television writer.