Fox's New Girl is a single-camera comedy starring Zooey Deschanel as Jess, a rather odd woman who is forced to move in with three guys (all with various strange quirks) due to a bad break-up with your run-of-the-mill "a-hole who never deserved such a nice girl.” The show follows Jess as she attempts to navigate through her new life. Bored already? I was too.

Despite the underwhelming premise, I gave the pilot a try when it aired last fall. I was shocked to realize it was worse than I had anticipated. The writing was unbearably cheesy and the show's core relationships were very unbelievable. It erred far too much on the absurd and obnoxious side. I, as a viewer, am never going to believe that three seemingly stereotypical guys would invite a girl to live with them who told them that she had just gone through a rough breakup and would thus "probably be watching Dirty Dancing like six or seven times... a day," and no number of model friends Jess might have is going to change this. Just… no, Fox, no.

The rest of the pilot passes in much the same vein; it is very much what it advertised itself as: stereotypically dreamy, ditzy girl moves in with stereotypically horny, dude-ish guys, and "battle of the sexes" antics ensue! It was justifiably ripped apart by the more reputable critics, and television watchers with more discerning/critically acclaimed palates wouldn't go near it.

If you are one of those people, I would like you to give it another chance. It's actually very good now, I promise!

Jess is still rather bizarre and dreamy, but it's no longer to a pathetic extent. It's not that they reeled the character in, exactly, but rather gave this aspect of her personality more purpose and made her lines much more genuinely funny instead of artificial and forced like they were in the pilot.

For instance, in the most recent episode that aired, she uses her natural niceness to get otherwise unhelpful people to do things for her. Also, the writers wisely chose to highlight her profession more in later episodes (she's a kindergarten teacher) which served to lend a fair amount of credibility to such a sunny character surviving in the "real world,” which was one of my major issues with the first few episodes. More focus on her friendship with the very likable, confident Cece, one of Jess's aforementioned "model friends,” was a definite improvement. 

If you're still not convinced, watch for Jess's roommates, who, over the course of the later half of the season, have shown themselves to be just as insane as she is.

The aggressively feminine and idiotic Schmidt is by far the show's most enjoyable character. He is the reason for one of the show's funniest running gags, a "Douchbag Jar" into which Schmidt must put between five and fifty dollars every time he says something like "Oh Jess, I just found a Groupon for hypnosis lessons. Think about what you could do with that. Sex stuff," or "Guys, has anyone seen my good peacoat?" His character is kept from being obnoxious by his sheer ineffectiveness with anyone of the opposite sex, and his desperation is rendered charming by how much he wants the people around him to like him.

Nick and Winston, the other two roommates, are also dramatically improved upon from the pilot, rounding out what has become a very watchable and engaging show.

Aside from Episode 8, which was given the unfortunate name "Bad in Bed" and is terrible, episodes dating from Episode 3, "Wedding," have all been great and have even elicited more laughs from me than some of my favorite NBC comedies.