Top 10 New Girl Mistakes That Were Left in the Show

When Jess is out of town and Schmidt spills an entire glass of red wine on her bedspread, it becomes evident that he has no idea how to do laundry. His attempt to use the machine includes “straining the soap” through the lint trap and putting quarters into the detergent compartment. This quirk doesn’t fit with Schmidt’s character at all, as he obviously has the highest standards for cleanliness in the loft. In the first season of the show, he even freaks out when he finds out that he and Nick have been using the same towel. As hilarious as this season 4 laundry scene is, it seems implausible that Schmidt went this long without his roommates finding out he doesn’t know how to use a washing machine.

Throughout the second season of the show, Schmidt is determined to get Cece back, even after she asks her mother to set her up with an Indian man. In this scene, Schmidt runs into Robby and finds out that they’re both spying on Cece’s date. They hug after they both admit that they’re still in love with her, with Schmidt on the left and Robby on the right. However, when Cece confronts them, they appear to have switched sides before they stand up. When it comes to Robby, it seems there’s no shortage of continuity errors. During his return in season six, an accident with Jess leads to a scar on his upper lip. The scar stays put for a few episodes, but suddenly disappears near the end of an episode where it could be prominently seen in earlier scenes (xref).

Throughout this episode, Winston struggles with a jigsaw puzzle, and there’s even a hilarious scene in which he reveals that he can’t tell the difference between green and brown. This detail could have survived as a character quirk for Winston if it hadn’t contradicted his later career as a cop for the LAPD. The medical evaluation to join the LAPD even states that “candidates must be able to accurately and quickly name colors.” While it’s unclear exactly what type of color blindness Winston has, it seems to be pretty severe, and would’ve been likely bad enough that it would disqualify him from joining a police force.

The show uses a lot of the actors’ improvisations, which means that some of New Girl’s hilarious moments have led to quite a few editing inconsistencies. At the start of this episode, Nick and Schmidt are having a steam in the shower room and talking about recovering from breakups. In typical Schmidt fashion, he whips off the towel around his waist to make a point about what Cece’s missing out on. When Winston walks in, the towel is magically wrapped around Schmidt’s waist again. Then, as the three have a bit of back and forth, the next cut shows the towel draped over his shoulder.

This iconic mural wasn’t always behind Winston’s bed. In season 1, after Jess moves into the loft and tries to befriend their landlord, Remy finds the weird alien mural inside Winston’s closet. While Winston was in Latvia, Schmidt took over his bedroom and had this hilariously bizarre painting commissioned. In later episodes, the mural - or a very similar looking one - suddenly takes up much more space and spans the whole wall behind Winston’s bed. However, considering the landlord told the group to paint over the mural he found in the closet, it doesn’t seem likely that they had the same thing recommissioned on an entire wall.

While this season 6 episode seems to have a ton of editing inconsistencies, this detail is one of the most obvious blunders. Cece and Schmidt are having a lot of issues with their apartment construction, and the renovations are going really slowly. Nick ends up helping Schmidt negotiate with the contractor, and even tries to teach him how to act tougher. Over time, they start believing that they’re being ripped off. When Nick asks “How did I not see this coming?” and turns to face Schmidt, the beer bottle he was holding in his right hand completely vanishes. With an editing issue like this, this episode definitely could have used some reconstruction.

At the beginning of season two, Cece comes to Schmidt’s “rebranding” party with her new boyfriend. Schmidt is pretty confused about why Cece is with a guy like Robby, and starts interrogating him to figure out what his “deal” is. When he asks him if he’s in a band, Robby comes up with this weird response. This turns out to be a total contradiction, as Robby reveals that he played bass on a Santana album much later in the series. Robby’s initial claim that he doesn’t like music could have possibly been sarcasm or a lie, perhaps because he could tell that Schmidt wasn’t his biggest fan when they first met, but considering all the Robby inconsistencies we’ve already seen, this was probably an oversight.

When everyone in the loft has issues with their cell reception, Jess proposes a “radical idea:” a home phone. It’s surprising to see an entire episode dedicated to a landline, especially since the group acts confused about how the technology works. All of the roommates are in their 30s at this point, and definitely would have grown up with one at home. They also seem to have forgotten that they already had a landline at one point. Back in season two, Jess and Winston even “stole” it when they were staging a robbery.

Any flashback scenes of Nick and Schmidt as roommates in college makes it safe for us to assume they’re about the same age. However, certai1 details in the early seasons of the show reveal a pretty big inconsistency about their age difference. During the group’s first Thanksgiving together in season 1, Nick tells Paul that he’s 30, and just a few episodes later, everyone celebrates Schmidt’s 29th birthday. Everything seems to make sense, until this scene happened in the second season. If Nick says that Schmidt is only six months younger than him, it would have been impossible for Nick to be 30 while Schmidt was still 28.

In Season 2, Jess decides to share something weird about herself with Winston, and tells him that she's extremely claustrophobic. She tries to prove her point by shutting herself in her closet, but she begins panicking when the door gets stuck. The landlord even comes to help get her out. Weirdly, in the very next episode, Jess hides in a tiny bathroom with Winston and Schmidt at a Christmas party. And he seems to have no issue being cramped inside the small space with two other people. We may have been able to forgive this blunder if Jess hadn’t contradicted her secret claustrophobia in back-to-back episodes...