Tonight’s New Girl: In Which Jess Reveals the Moment She Was Turned on by Nick (and Vice Versa)

NEW GIRL: Jess (Zooey Deschanel, L) contemplates her relationship with Nick (Jake Johnson, R) in the "Fluffer" episode of NEW GIRL airing Tuesday, Oct. 2 (9:00-9:30 PM ET/PT) on FOX. ©2012 Fox Broadcasting Co.
Photo: Greg Gayne/FOX

In tonight’s episode of New Girl, Jess will confess to Nick that there actually was one time when he really did it for her. Apparently the writers weren’t entirely committed to what that moment of arousal was when it came time to shoot the turn-on flashback: Jake Johnson (Nick) told us that they shot fifteen different versions of the scene, with the writers yelling different suggestions at him, such as, “Yell at that homeless guy!” (Not a spoiler: Berating homeless people was ultimately nixed as Jess’s soft spot.) There’s a vocal group of New Girl viewers who we suspect are going to flip out when Nick and Jess confront their affection for each other in tonight’s installment, which was written by J.J. Philbin; she also wrote “Injured” and “Fancyman (Part 1),” and Johnson says she gets Nick Miller better than anyone. “This is the first time where they kind of go at one another head first,” he says. As is their habit, their heart-to-heart will be very yell-y, even louder than the time they shook their butts at each other. “I think it’s pretty bold considering Nick and Jess are so tippy-toe about their feelings for one other.”

Why go there now? Johnson says “the fact that they never addressed it started feeling a bit weird.” He picked up on Nick’s warm fuzzies for Jess way back in the very beginning of the first season, in the episode “Wedding.” “Nick walks over to Jess after Caroline breaks up with him and asks her to dance. They walk on the dance floor and for a second you think this is going to be a really romantic dance and the start of something between them,” he says. “And then they do the chicken dance. That scene could have played out a different way, but I think what it gave us was the moment in which both characters realized, We have something between us, but it’s not for right now.” No spoilers as to what’s next for them, but Johnson says the mutual attraction makes more and more sense to him the longer they film. At the moment, the cast is shooting an episode in which Jess’s parents, played by Jamie Lee Curtis and Rob Reiner, come to visit. He tells us, laughing, “I caught myself thinking, Oh yeah, that’s one of the reasons she likes Nick. Her dad is kind of a grump, kind of rough around the edges. Rob Reiner doesn’t want to hug anybody.”

Here’s the beginning of their big talk:

New Girl: Jess Reveals How Nick Turns Her On