Entertainment

‘Girl’ wonder

GEEK CHIC: Zooey Deschanel (with Max Greenfield) stars as Jess. (Isabella Vosmikova/FOX)

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Finally, there may be an answer to the hole in the universe left by “Friends” and “Seinfeld.”

New Girl,” Fox’s new comedy, is off-beat, kind of outrageous and most importantly, funny. Actually sometimes on tonight’s premiere, it’s even laugh-out-loud and squirt-diet-Coke-out-of-your-nose funny.

This clearly is a shock — for me, at least. The last TV show I saw starring Zooey Deschanel, was the truly terrible “Tin Man” miniseries.

Not only was it insufferable, but Deschanel was so boring, she almost put herself to sleep.

Redemption from bad TV is Zooey’s now, however. In this new series, Deschanel is Jess, a young woman who moves in with three men after catching her live-in boyfriend sleeping in — with someone else.

Jess is an adorable kook who happens to have the most annoying habits in the world. Like? Like making everything into a song. You know you know people who do this, and you know you want to punch them out every time they do it.

She also is depressed and continually watches “Dirty Dancing.”

After the disastrously embarrassing incident with her boyfriend, Jess interviews with three guys (Max Greenfield, Damon Wayans Jr. and Jake M. Johnson) she finds on Craigslist who are looking for a roommate.

They have no interest in taking in a woman — until she mentions that her best friend, Cece (Hannah Simone), is a model — and so are all Cece’s friends.

Greenfield is wheeler-dealer Max, a totally inappropriate semi-sleazy guy with a heart of gold who thinks he’s a player. Johnson is Nick, a bartender who once had great life plans and is the smartest of the bunch. Coach is Wayans, a guy who is clueless when it comes to women and thinks speaking in sports metaphors makes great conversation.

The chemistry between Jess and the guys is just great. She’s a dork with men and they’re semi-clueless with women, and so they actually end up helping each other out.

But it’s the dialogue that takes this series over the top. When she gets stood up in a restaurant, for example, and the guys go to find her, they say they are all her dates. “We’re reverse Mormons,” says one of them. “One man just isn’t enough for her.”

The reason this show isn’t getting four stars (yet) is that Wayans has been called back to the dreadful “Happy Endings,” also on Fox, and so will be replaced by Lamorne Morris — whom I haven’t seen. He may seamlessly replace Wayans with hardly a ripple, or he may cause the tide to turn and wreck the ship.

Was that a dreaded sports metaphor?