New Girl’s Exterior Shot

The building pictured in this post is used as the exterior shot for the Fox TV sitcom, New Girl. Starring Zooey Deschanel who plays the character Jess, “an offbeat young woman.” Jess moves into the pictured apartment building along with three single men. The IMDB synopsis tells us, “although they find her behavior very unusual, the men support her – most of the time.” This is the Binford Building that was constructed in 1906 and was converted into an apartment building in the 1980s. It is located in LA’s Artist District, home for over 900 movie shoots a year. It also happens to be across the street from Pie Hole, Dan’s favorite LA pie shop, so we had plenty of time to study it while we munched on great pie, washed down with good coffee. Deschanel has often been tagged a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG), a typecast that imagines women as bubbly, but ultimately shallow creatures that exists solely to help brooding, soulful young men to embrace life. In her movie, 500 Days of Summer, this is how co-star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character Tom sees her, much to his eventual chagrin, when he finds out that his fantasy is not true. In New Girl, Deschanel continues to explode the MPDG stereotype, at least, within the confines of a Fox TV sitcom.