Season six of “New Girl” ended  with viewers feeling content after main characters Nick Miller (Jake Johnson) and Jessica Day (Zooey Deschanel) start dating and married couple Cece Parikh (Hannah Simone) and Winston Schmidt (Max Greenfield) get news that they are pregnant with their first child.

The seventh season opens three years later, when Nick is coming back to LA with Jessica after a European book tour for his novel, “The Pepperwood Chronicles.” The three year jump gave the characters the opportunity they needed to potentially make the show more interesting and reveal a new side of the characters that we haven’t seen before.

While this was a great idea, it wasn’t well-executed, and nothing really changed about the characters. It just sped up the timeline to fit the show into the final season. The characters had a three year span to develop into a different character with time,but there was almost no development at all. I understand why the writers chose to keep some things constant, but I wish we would have seen more character development within the three year span.

Another issue with the three year time jump is that the writers now have to rework the entire series by setting up a new conflict within the group. As a way to keep viewers interested throughout the whole season, creating only one conflict will be challenging. This foreshadows a more stressful season for viewers, because even though there is an endless amount of opportunities, there is also an endless amount of ways that people could potentially lose interest in the show without variety.

The season sets up the ongoing conflict very early, which is exciting for viewers. With the older seasons, some of the episodes didn’t fit the constant storyline and were just there to fill an episode for the week, but now there is a reason to watch to see if this conflict will be solved, which is something viewers have been waiting forever for.

While the seventh and final season lacked the support it needed to go along with the three year time jump, throughout the season we should see the characters change with time and find more conflicts than just the one, which will be exciting to see how the writers of New Girl cap off their final season.