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List of New Girl characters

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 15, 2026
Entity authorityQ17010789
Source-derived summary

New Girl is an American television sitcom created by Elizabeth Meriwether. The show, set in Los Angeles, depicts the interpersonal adventures of offbeat teacher Jess (Zooey Deschanel) after her spontaneous move into an apartment loft with three men: Nick (Jake Johnson), Schmidt (Max Greenfield), and Winston (Lamorne Morris). Jess' best friend Cece (Hannah Simone) and their former roommate Coach (Damon Wayans Jr.) regularly visit them. The show also features a number of characters that appear as love interests, acquaintances, or family members for the characters in multiple episodes in a season or across multiple seasons.

Main characters

Jessica Day

Jessica Christopher Day (Zooey Deschanel) is introduced as a bubbly, offbeat teacher in her early thirties who is originally from Portland, Oregon. After the shocking discovery in the pilot episode that her live-in boyfriend, Spencer, is cheating on her, she moves into the guys' apartment where Nick, Schmidt, and Winston (or Coach in the Pilot episode) help her move on from her break-up, with the help of her childhood friend, Cece, a semi-successful model. From there, Jess embarks on a journey of self-discovery and growth as she navigates through a series of relationships and jobs.

During season 1, Jess casually dated, the most memorable of those men being her music teacher co-worker Paul Genzlinger (Justin Long) and Russell Schiller (Dermot Mulroney), a divorced father of one of her students. In Season 2 of New Girl, Jess gets laid off from her teaching job and takes up part-time work while searching for a new teaching position. She ends up teaching creative writing in adult education.

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Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current 263-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where List, Girl and characters can be independently traced.
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This entry incorporates text from List of New Girl characters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.