The Network Marriage Plot

We nowadays are too anti-romantic to quite embrace them--even the excellent book called The Marriage Plot does not (spoiler!) end with true love gratified--but marriage plots do, mercifully, live on, in the form of the classic, slow-build network sitcom romance. Our Darcys and Lizzys are Ross and Rachel, Jim and Pam, Will and Emma--subjects of will-they-won't-they teasery spread languidly over episodes and seasons.

To my utmost delight, Fox has fashioned a Tuesday night with back-to-back sitcoms of the best kind, starring lead ladies with Lizzy wits. New Girl's Jess is zany and adorable, as only Zooey Deschanel can be. She means well all the time and risks harming others only by annoying them with excessive cheer. Mindy of The Mindy Project is also zany and adorable, but with a twist of caustic Kaling lime. Jess is willing to impersonate Elvis at a funeral to help her roommate (who is also her Darcy); Mindy freely admits that she expects to go to hell because she loves gossip and doesn't "really care about the environment."


If such leading Lizzys weren't wonderful enough, we are so lucky as to get True Darcy Types (TDTs) cast opposite them. In order to explain what I mean by a TDT, I must remind us why Pride and Prejudice is the greatest book ever written. (Do not bother to quibble with this statement of plain fact.) Mr. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennett are not merely an unlikely or seemingly ill-suited couple. They are enemies. Darcy becomes our beloved in time, but we first see him swagger haughtily into the ballroom, acting like a total dick. He won't deign to dance with Lizzy, calling her "tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me."

We may be intrigued by this "fine, tall person" with his rep of ten thousand a year and a massive estate in Derbyshire, but his ill manners warn us away. A TDT, then, must be handsome (but not obviously, sweetly or cloyingly so), and a source of both fascination and repulsion. Beneath the dickish exterior he must be shy, wounded, noble, misunderstood, and in need of a softening touch. In other words, perfect for being so imperfect.

All of which aptly describes both Nick, the law school dropout, scruffy bartender and premature curmudgeon opposite Jess; and Danny, the well-exercised, misanthropic obstetrician with a Staten accent opposite Mindy. Each is disagreeable, handsome as if by accident, and initially, officially treats the lady in question with mockery--though of course we know the Darcy will inevitably be drawn to the Lizzy, perhaps for being so sunnily unlike himself.


TRADITION holds that sitcom marriage plots should unravel as slowly, circuitously and infuriatingly as possible--the more fateful twists and alternate suitors the better. New Girl's writers have been bold, placing their pair in coitus by Season Two. The Mindy Project is still in its first season, and, hewing closer to tradition, merely hints at a Mindy-Danny thing. Done right, the earliest of such hints are so imperceptible as to just give the viewer an inexplicable sense of wishing to see the pair together, as if no one else had conceived the idea. So it went on New Girl. When Nick and Jess kissed this season, we who saw it coming before they did (i.e. everyone) got to experience the satisfactions of both love and our own uncanny predictive powers fulfilled.

Whether these pairs will actually be united, and how many plot twists and hurdles will have to be put in their paths to keep the shows moving along in the meantime, remain to be seen. But this much is already certain: love and sitcoms, both so hopelessly old-fashioned, are alive and well.

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