"New Girl" creator Liz Meriwether has poured cold water on reunion hopes, insisting "There are no scripts" despite Max Greenfield's recent claims to the contrary.
Meriwether addressed the speculation while speaking at the Season 1 finale screening of her current series "Furious" on Thursday night at the DGA in West Hollywood. "I don't even have the scripts written for the things that I need to have scripts written for," she said, noting she's currently busy adapting Britney Spears's memoir "The Woman in Me" into a film to be directed by Jon M. Chu and produced by Marc Platt.
The reunion buzz began in late July when Greenfield, who played Schmidt on the Fox sitcom, told "Today with Jenna & Sheinelle," "As far as I know, it's happening. I've seen scripts, they're amazing." Meriwether fired back with a tongue-in-cheek Instagram video, joking, "Max told everybody that there's amazing scripts of a 'New Girl' reunion that I've written. Um — and just an update on that — the scripts were pretty good until everybody just started giving me notes on every little thing," before rattling off a list of changes the show's stars had supposedly requested.
Rather than shutting the door on the idea entirely, Meriwether seems to be embracing the public back-and-forth itself. "I've honestly been enjoying this thing, whatever this is, that's like this back and forth between the cast and me, and I think this is the show and I feel like maybe in the world of the internet…maybe the show is just this, these little videos, maybe that's the reunion. I don't know," she said.
Greenfield has since clarified his comments exclusively with Variety, joking that he'd gotten confused because a different kind of reunion actually is happening. Deschanel, Jake Johnson, Lamorne Morris, Hannah Simone and Damon Wayans Jr. will reunite with him at the Chrysalis Butterfly Ball in Los Angeles on Oct. 10, where the group will accept the Rising Phoenix Award — an honor recognizing the show's theme of starting over and those who make second chances possible. Greenfield will host the gala.
As for the Spears biopic, Meriwether said it's too early to reveal much. "It's really interesting because I haven't written a movie in a long time, so that's been part of the process is just trying to think in a two-hour story as opposed to like an eight-hour story, which is what I've been used to doing," she said. She has not yet met Spears, though she said, "I would love to."
Photo: Genevieve, CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
