Many sitcoms have used the trope of the “womanizing friend”, most notably Friends with Joey Tribbiani, but there’s another popular TV series that did his arc a lot better: New Girl. Created by Elizabeth Meriwether, New Girl premiered on Fox in 2011 and came to an end in 2018 after seven seasons and a lot of ups and downs in the lives of its main characters. The series followed Jess Day (Zooey Deschanel), a bubbly teacher who after finding out that her boyfriend was cheating on her, moved into a loft with three strangers (Schmidt, Nick Miller, and Winston), who soon became her family.
Years before New Girl, another sitcom dominated TVs around the world: Friends. Created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, Friends debuted on NBC in 1994 and came to an end in 2004 after 10 seasons, and is now regarded as one of the best TV shows of all time. Friends followed a group of six young adults living in New York City and juggling their personal, professional, and social lives the best way they could. An important character in the group was Joey (Matt LeBlanc), the dim-witted but lovable member who was also a “womanizer”, dating various women throughout the series, including his friend Rachel (Jennifer Aniston). Joey’s arc is similar to that of New Girl’s Schmidt (Max Greenfield), but the latter’s was done a lot better than Joey’s.
Although Joey is one of the most beloved and popular characters from Friends, the writers didn’t do justice to the character. While others like Chandler Bing and Monica Geller went through a whole journey to the point where their versions in the last season are a major improvement from the ones in the first, Joey had a reverse journey, becoming dumber and showing zero improvement from his portrayal in earlier episodes. The cherry on top was that Joey was the only one in the group who didn’t get proper closure in the final season of Friends, and was left as the ladies man he had been from the beginning, and while this was fixed in the spinoff series Joey, it was too late by then.
On the other hand, New Girl’s Schmidt had a similar arc to that of Joey but it was handled a lot better. Just like Joey, Schmidt was the “ladies man” of the group, though he wasn’t childish like Joey and was actually quite arrogant and even rude sometimes. Schmidt wasn’t looking for a committed relationship either until he fell in love with Cece (Hannah Simone), and though their relationship went through a lot of rough patches, they worked through them and ended up getting married and forming a family. Schmidt, then, went from a narcissistic womanizer with no real respect for women, to being in a committed relationship based on love and respect and even became a stay-at-home father while Cece continued with her career.
Friends focused more on giving happy endings to the rest of the group and completely forgot about Joey, and by the time they tried to fix that with a spinoff series, the damage was already done, and the series didn’t even have the desired impact and success. Surely, New Girl also has its flaws, and not all its characters went through the development they needed through the series (as is the case of Jess), but at least it avoided the “Joey mistake” with Schmidt, as they had a lot of similarities.