Zooey Deschanel Almost Passed On New Girl Script Because Of Its Ridiculous Original Title
And honestly, we can’t blame her.
It's not entirely uncommon for the details of a movie or show to change during production. Sometimes the writers feel that there are more things to explore with one character than another, and sometimes the crew realizes that the story is disjointed or not compelling enough.
The details of the smaller scale tend to change almost every time. Every single project has its working title before it gets the official one that is later used for the release. Fox's sitcom New Girl, starring Zooey Deschanel, was no different. Except the working title for it was so ridiculously bad that it almost made the actress pass on the script.
As it turned out, the show was going to be called Chicks & Dicks, and it lacked a lot of the silliness that it ended up having. The silly name wasn't all that silly, though. As Liz Meriwether, the show's creator, revealed in an interview with Glamour, she was hoping to make the show stand out in the sea of pilots being thrown around at the time.
What's even more surprising is that the name of the show that made the cut, New Girl, wasn't the best choice for the series either. Meriwether admits that it might have made the sitcom's survival more difficult than it already was:
“Looking back, having the word 'girl' in the title made it hard. A lot of men liked the show, but it definitely made it harder for us to ring in the male audience at first. The show was just as much about guys as about a girl. It ended up working, I guess!” she explained.
Fortunately, it worked in the end. In fact, the symbiotic work of the perfectly chosen cast and brilliant crew made the show so popular that there are still many fans who rely on it as their comfort show. Would that have been possible without Zooey Deschanel deciding to give the story a chance, despite the terrible title? No one knows.
If you want to revisit New Girl and get another glimpse into the lives of Jess, Nick, Schmidt, and Winston, you can stream all 7 seasons of the sitcom on Hulu, Disney Plus, or Amazon Prime Video.
Source: Glamour