It’s not easy to produce a popular sitcom, but imagine how much more pressure it is to produce an episode of that sitcom to follow the Super Bowl — TV’s biggest audience, bar none.
“Every now and then I think, ‘There will be more people watching this than anything I’ve ever done or probably will do,’ ” says “New Girl” creator/executive producer Liz Meriwether.
Fox’s “New Girl” will lead out of Super Bowl XLVIII — in which the Denver Broncos take on the Seattle Seahawks — on Sunday and joins surprise Golden Globe-winner “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” for an hour of post-football funniness. With more than 100 million people worldwide typically watching the game, the episode is almost guaranteed to garner the show’s biggest audience ever.
“We wanted it to be the biggest, craziest, funniest episode ever — the most fun version of the show that we can present,” says Meriwether.
“New Girl” is like a modern-day “Friends,” set in LA, in which three men and one woman — New Girl Jess Day (series star and producer Zooey Deschanel) — share a loft. And Jess’ best friend, model Cece (Hannah Simone) drops by an awful lot.
Superstar Prince will be the episode’s special guest star, and other guest stars include a few Victoria’s Secret Angels and Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw. While the show’s stars and producers were enthusiastic about getting the chance to work with Prince, they’ve had their share of big-name guest stars before, including Jamie Lee Curtis, Rob Reiner and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Although this is the first time Prince has ever deigned to appear in a sitcom, getting him on board wasn’t as hard as you might think. “Last year, we were making this episode called ‘Virgins’ about how each of these characters lost their virginity,” says Meriwether. “In our original story, Cece lost her virginity to Prince in a hotel room. We tried to get him for that episode but he wasn’t available.”
(Cece ended up losing her virginity to Mick Jagger, according to “New Girl” lore, but producers couldn’t get him either, so they showed a shot of a stand-in’s backside.) After that, “Prince came back to us and said he was a fan of the show and although he couldn’t do it this time, he would love to do it,” says Meriwether.
She took that with a grain of salt, but this year, Prince was back. “He approached us again and said, ‘No, seriously, I would love to be on the show, I’m a really big fan.’ At the same time, we learned we had gotten the Super Bowl episode. We felt like that was the perfect time to use him.”
Besides just the thrill of getting to write and produce for Prince, Meriwether also is excited about the prospect of introducing “New Girl” to new viewers.
“If you haven’t seen the show, this is a great time to start watching,” she says. “I feel like everyone thinks it’s a girlie show because it’s called ‘New Girl,’ but most of the show’s characters are guys.”
The show’s writers learned early on that they were getting the post-game episode and started cooking up storylines accordingly. “We’ve been working on this episode since the beginning of the year,” says Meriwether.
In the episode, Jess happens to meet Prince in a bar (because that’s where most of us meet big stars) and he invites her and her friends to a party at his house.
“Zooey plays this big, fun outlandish character and he plays this quiet, wise oracle who is helping her through this love situation,” says Meriwether. “There’s a really fun montage in which Prince is making her over as the Prince version of himself. We structured the episode around him.”
Eventually, the gang — which includes Jess, Cece, Jess’ boyfriend, Nick (Jake Johnson), Schmidt (Max Greenfield), Winston (Lamorne Morris) and Coach (Damon Wayans, Jr.) — ends up at Prince’s huge house for the party. He performs, of course.
“He plays a great new song that in a strange twist of fate totally worked with the story we are telling,” says Meriwether. “Shooting that performance was one of the highlights of my life.”
Prince has other tasks besides performing and making over Jess: He also takes on Cece in a mean game of ping pong.
“Prince is amazing at ping-pong,” says Meriwether. “He’s amazing at everything.”
Beyond Prince, Jess and Nick — who met as roommates and have been dating all of this season — will have a “big romantic moment’ at the end. Says Meriwether: “At the end of the day, this series is about the love story between them.”