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In the early days of New Girl, Jess Day (Zooey Deschanel) was a toddler-sized tutu made flesh: cute, affected, hard to actually dislike, but earning grins largely by doggedly evoking childhood's clumsy and doomed attempts at grace. Building a comedy around her resulted in a one-note dynamic in which her three male roommates were forever goggle-eyed at the things she didn't know, couldn't do, or couldn't bear to think about, only to find themselves ultimately unable to really relate to her but also unable to resist her, the way you might be unable to resist a sudden infestation of baby koalas.

But as the show matured through its first season, it emerged as much more of an ensemble, with the flavor of Jess' social idiosyncrasies adjusted from scorched-sugar bitterness to something more complex, while those of Schmidt (Max Greenfield) and Nick (Jake Johnson) emerged more sharply. (Candidly, the show has yet to find a bead on Lamorne Morris' Winston, who changes from week to week while Schmidt and Nick become just as indelible and oddballsy as Jess.)

The writing got sharper, everybody stopped putting all their creative weight on Deschanel's ability to open her eyes even wider than last week, and it began to feel like a real show. It wasn't just that they got better at making Nick and Schmidt funny — though they did — it was that they got better at making Nick and Schmidt weird, and lost, and charmingly devoid of grace, just like Jess, so that she didn't have to be that way, all the time, to the utmost degree, about everything.

These days, Jess isn't as confused and isn't as excited; she's legitimately got her own vibe. The writers figured out that marching to the beat of one's own drummer is supposed to feel like a choice; if you're doing it because you're too dumb to walk and listen to drums at the same time, that's not the same thing.

Then, about three-quarters of the way through their second season, they decided to do one of the toughest things in the world to get right: they head-on addressed whether something was maybe going to flare up between Jess and Nick, who had done both a lot of platonic bonding and a lot of slightly less platonic bonding as time went on. Now, the legitimate dangers of getting characters together are overblown as a general matter and the Moonlighting curse is a fiction (at least as applied to Moonlighting). But with these two, who had begun at the opposite ends of the spectrum of normalcy and function, where Nick was the level-headed roommate and Jess often came off like an alien from a polka-dotted planet, the trick was to make it seem like he wasn't a grown man hooking up with an intellectual 12-year-old because she was pretty and simple. She could not continue as a person who couldn't stand up in high-heeled shoes or successfully step onto an escalator; to have an adult relationship, even in a comedy, she had to be written as an adult.

In that sense, while the fear is always that delving straight into your will-they-or-won't-they dynamic is detrimental to the chemistry of your show, it was hugely helpful to this one. Persuasive romances require some level of parity between personalities, and sexy ones require everyone to seem like they've completed adolescence. It was very canny to make the first Nick/Jess smooch, in the episode "Cooler," surprisingly hot rather than warmly awkward, which it easily could have been. For them to kiss like nervous teenagers would have been kind of expected; for them to kiss like that actually added something.

The writers have continued to make unexpected choices and provide incremental progress, mixing episodes in the Nick-Jess story that seemed chemistry-driven with ones that seemed friendship-driven, so that it was presented as the thing that would create the most challenging problem for true friends: a blistering desire to make out grounded by a bond that's important enough that nobody wants to mess it up. That's meant that the romance outwardly happens in fits and starts and impulsive decisions, but also, underneath, moves along an unnerving but steady emotional track.

It's been pretty terrific storytelling, and pretty romantic and sexy, and for a show that started out seeming like Dumb Snow White And The Three Patient Older Brothers, it's quite an accomplishment.

O'Brien's writing career, fame and considerable beauty all blossomed and peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, not long after her harrowing fight to win back custody of her two sons. Oddly, O'Brien never comments on her striking good looks and their effect on her life, but stunning photographs scattered throughout this book, including Lord Snowdon's dreamy portrait for The Sunday Times of London in 1970, suggest they must have played a role.

It was during this heady period that O'Brien, who was regularly turning out novels and plays, threw weekly parties attended by such luminaries as Len Deighton, Roger Vadim, Jane Fonda, Sean Connery, Shirley MacLaine and Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing — under whose treatment she disastrously experimented with LSD. She describes a one-night stand with actor Robert Mitchum and chaste nights with Marlon Brando and Richard Burton. Paul McCartney once accompanied her home and sang a lullaby to her sleepy sons.

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Studios are putting most of their eggs in $100 million baskets these days, even as American independent filmmakers go hungry from lack of mainstream attention. But two of my favorite American indie writer-directors, Jeff Nichols and Ramin Bahrani, have new films with bigger stars than they've had before — films they hope will break through to wider audiences. The results, at least artistically, are impressive.

Nichols' first feature, Shotgun Stories, was a small masterpiece, the story of a blood feud between half-brothers that turns tragic. His second, Take Shelter, featured Shotgun star Michael Shannon as a man eaten alive by fear of losing his wife and child to apocalyptic forces. They're in very different keys, and Nichols' latest, Mud, is in still another. It's his Huckleberry Finn picture: It has a boy protagonist, it's set on the Mississippi River, and its narrative is both fluid and full of surprising twists.

The extraordinary Tye Sheridan plays 14-year-old Ellis. He lives on an Arkansas houseboat, where his mother is on the verge of leaving his father and selling the creekside home Ellis loves. One morning, he and a ruffian pal called Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) head to a river island on which Neckbone has spotted a boat in a tree, evidently thrown up there by a storm. It turns out there's a man living there, and his name is Mud.

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Young And Old, Driven 'Solo' Beyond Themselves

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sold the rights to his memoir to HarperCollins, the publishing house announced Tuesday. The book will be "a full and frank look at his public and private life — from his formative years in Queens, New York, his long record of fighting for justice and championing government reform, his commitment to public service, and his election and service as the 56th Governor of New York State," according to a statement. The New York Times quoted an anonymous source at HarperCollins claiming that the publisher is now trying to drop a biography of Cuomo by New York Post columnist Fredric U. Dicker because of a potential conflict of interest. Asked about the Times' report on Dicker's book, HarperCollins spokesperson Tina Andreadis said in an email that "All I can say that right now [is that] we have a book under contract."

Richard Brody explains "Why The Great Gatsby Endures" in a New Yorker article: "The Great Gatsby is, above all, a novel of conspicuous consumption — not even of appetite but of the ineluctable connection between wealth and spectacle."

A lost poem by Vita Sackville-West — the English writer most famous for her love affair with Virginia Woolf — was discovered when it fell out of a book as scholars were doing conservation work in her library. A love poem written in French, it is addressed to her mistress, the writer Violet Trefusis. According to a translation printed in The Guardian, it reads in part: "I tear secrets from your yielding flesh/Giving thanks to the fate which made you my mistress."

Caspar Henderson writes about the (unexpectedly fascinating) history of the octopus in Western literature: "Appetite, loathing, and lust have certainly played big parts in human imaginings of these beasts. But we should take a cue from the Minoans who portrayed them in images that, even after 3,500 years, almost sing out loud in celebration of their strangeness and beauty."

For The Millions, Michael Bourne looks at the changing role of literary critics: "However critics rise to the challenge of the information overload facing readers today, rise we must, because as much information there is on sites like Amazon and GoodReads and the rest, there is too often precious little real intelligence. This is the paradox of the information age: the proliferation of data points makes smart criticism more relevant, not less."