Entertainment
From ‘New Girl’ to ‘Furious,’ Every Liz Meriwether Show, Ranked
Liz Meriwether has spent over a decade proving that she can write anything. She got her start with New Girl, a Fox sitcom about the most aggressively earnest roommate in Los Angeles. And now, she’s running a show about a trafficking survivor who murders wealthy men as a form of therapy with Furious. (Hulu renewed that one for a second season before the finale even aired.) In between, she turned the Theranos saga into something that plays like a cringe comedy. So, yeah, the woman has range.
Meriwether’s thing, across every series she helms, is characters who are funny and damaged in equal measure. They cope with real trauma by being quirky or weird or both. None of it should work as well as it does, but six shows in, Meriwether keeps pulling it off. Here’s every one of her creations, ranked.
6
‘Bless This Mess’ (2019–2020)
Dax Shepard and Lake Bell play Mike and Rio, a married couple who leave New York City for a run-down Nebraska farm they’ve inherited, only to discover that rural life involves a lot more septic-tank emergencies and nosy neighbors than the Instagram version suggests. The show surrounds them with a lineup of small-town oddballs, including Pam Grier as a no-nonsense local and Ed Begley Jr. as a neighbor with too many power tools.
Meriwether co-created this one with Bell, and their affection for the setting is real, if a little restrained. The fish-out-of-water premise gives the cast plenty to do in any individual episode, but the show never quite figured out what it wanted to be beyond pleasant. It ran two seasons on ABC before getting canceled in 2020, and while it’s sweet and easy to watch, it doesn’t have the sharpness or the emotional undertow that Meriwether’s stronger work tends to find. Call it her warm-up lap for a busier stretch ahead.
5
‘Single Parents’ (2018–2020)
Taran Killam leads here as Will, a recently divorced dad and amateur weatherman who’s forgotten that he used to have a personality outside of his kid’s school pickup line. His fellow single parents, played by Leighton Meester, Brad Garrett, Kimrie Lewis, and Jake Choi, take it upon themselves to remind him, mostly by dragging him to bars and forcing him to have fun. Meriwether co-created the show with J. J. Philbin, and it leans more into ensemble warmth than anything else.
The kid actors carry a surprising amount of weight here, and the show is at its best when it lets the parent-child dynamics get genuinely uncomfortable. It doesn’t reinvent the family sitcom, but the cast has real chemistry, and Garrett in particular plays his role with a kind of deadpan weariness that the show didn’t always know what to do with. ABC canceled it after two seasons, though it probably would have benefited from a third.
4
‘The Dropout’ (2022)
Most shows about the Theranos scandal would play it straight, but Meriwether created and oversaw this eight-episode limited series (based on the ABC News podcast) as something closer to a darkly dry comedy. The whole arc traces Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) from awkward Stanford freshman to a CEO running a fraud so big it would make a Bond villain pause, and the cast Meriwether assembled sells every stage of it. Naveen Andrews as Sunny Balwani, William H. Macy as a family friend turned patent adversary, Sam Waterston as George Shultz, and Stephen Fry as the Theranos scientist who deserved a less corrupt employer.
Seyfried is the reason The Dropout works. Her Holmes does that fake baritone, mirrors the mannerisms of powerful men, and then fumbles small talk with lab technicians. Seyfried makes all of it strangely funny without letting you forget the real consequences. The series proved Meriwether could do something cold and propulsive and still find the mortifying human moments she’s always been good at. Before you strap into the insanity that is Nathan Fielder‘s Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, you owe it to yourself to revisit Seyfried’s performance in a Hulu miniseries that’s perfect from start to finish.
3
‘Dying for Sex’ (2025)
Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate play Molly and Nikki, lifelong best friends navigating Molly’s terminal cancer diagnosis via a method that involves a lot more Tinder dates than most prestige dramas would attempt. Meriwether co-created and ran this one with Kim Rosenstock, adapting the podcast by Molly Kochan about her own experience leaving an unhappy marriage after her diagnosis and embarking on a run of sexual adventures. Sissy Spacek, Rob Delaney, and Jay Duplass round out the cast.
The show’s gamble is tonal, and it pays off. Williams plays Molly as reckless and stubbornly alive, even as the clock ticks. Slate matches her beat for beat as the friend trying to hold everything together while also being genuinely jealous of Molly’s sudden lack of inhibition. Meriwether and Rosenstock wrote something that doesn’t treat terminal illness as a metaphor for anything. It just sits inside the mess of being a person who wants more out of whatever time is left.
2
‘Furious’ (2026–Present)
Meriwether has said Furious draws from the 1987 film Black Widow, but the show goes somewhere darker and weirder than that comparison suggests. A newly minted FBI agent named Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) is tracking a serial killer who targets men connected to a trafficking ring. The killer, Catherine (Lola Petticrew), is a young woman whose emotional development froze at 15, and the show keeps reminding you of that through pop music playlists and childlike accessories that sit right next to the violence. Scoot McNairy, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, and Jake Lacy round out the cast.
What makes it work is that Meriwether spent time interviewing FBI agents who work on trafficking cases, and that research shows up in the small, grinding details of Alice’s job as much as in the plot. The show is the darkest thing Meriwether has made and also wildly funny in stretches. Thank the TV gods that Hulu has already renewed it for Season 2.
1
‘New Girl’ (2011–2018)
Zooey Deschanel is Jess Day, a teacher who moves into an L.A. loft with three guys after a breakup and proceeds to upend their very bro-y existence. The guys, Jake Johnson‘s grumpy bartender Nick, Max Greenfield‘s preening Schmidt, and Lamorne Morris‘ increasingly chaotic Winston, start out as her reluctant roommates and eventually become the most codependent friend group on television. Hannah Simone rounds out the core cast as Cece, Jess’s model best friend.
Meriwether created the show and ran it through seven seasons, and what still holds up about New Girl is how committed it stayed to being weird. The easy version of this premise is a will-they-won’t-they with some quirky garnish, and while Nick and Jess certainly deliver on that front, the show’s real engine is the ensemble’s willingness to escalate. Schmidt’s pronunciation of “chutney” became a running bit that somehow never stopped being funny. Winston’s cat, Ferguson, got his own storylines. Even Damon Wayans Jr. was there for a stint of the group’s misadventures as Coach. The show trusted that its characters were interesting enough to follow into the strangest territories, and it was right. Nothing Meriwether has made since has run this long or burrowed this deep into the cultural zeitgeist. Yet, at least.
New Girl
- Release Date
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2011 – 2018-00-00
- Network
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FOX
- Showrunner
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Elizabeth Meriwether
- Directors
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Trent O’Donnell, Jay Chandrasekhar, Max Winkler, Fred Goss, Jesse Peretz, Steve Welch, Lynn Shelton, Josh Greenbaum, Russ T. Alsobrook, Bill Purple, Christine Gernon, Lorene Scafaria, Michael Schultz, Peyton Reed, Tristram Shapeero, Eric Appel, Alec Berg, Jason Winer, Michael Spiller, Steve Pink, Alex Hardcastle, Andrew Fleming, Craig Zisk, Daniel Attias
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