Oscar-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis sparked backlash after describing her guest role on the hit Fox sitcom "New Girl" as "awful" and "not fun" during a panel promoting her new NBC comedy, then posted a lengthy Instagram clarification dismissing the uproar as overblown.
Curtis, 67, made the remarks on August 10 at an NBCUniversal panel while promoting "Newlyweds," a new multi-camera sitcom she co-created with Gail Lerner. The show, which stars real-life couple Téa Leoni and Tim Daly, is set to premiere October 23 on NBC. Curtis serves as executive producer and has a recurring role.
But it was her off-the-cuff comparison between multi-camera and single-camera comedy formats that drew attention, and not the kind a press tour is designed to generate. USA TODAY reported that Curtis told the panel audience:
"It's a great show, 'New Girl,' very funny, but doing it is just like doing a movie. You know, you've got a camera crew, and nobody laughs. It's silent, and it's awful. For me, awful. Single-camera comedies, for me, not fun."
Curtis appeared in six episodes of "New Girl" across four seasons beginning in 2012, playing Joan, the mother of Zooey Deschanel's character Jess. She shared screen time with the late Rob Reiner, who played Jess's father, Bob Day.
By the next day, the comments had drawn what the reporting described as "strong reactions." Curtis responded on August 11 with an Instagram post that reframed her remarks as a throwaway line blown out of proportion. She wrote:
"As if we don't have bigger issues facing Americans and the world at large and natural disasters and unnatural behaviors of despots than to be concerned about a flip comment picked up at a press moment promoting NEWLYWEDS @NBC."
She went on to praise the show and its cast, calling Deschanel "an absolute gem of a human" and describing her scenes with Reiner as "sweet and lovely." She also insisted the broader point was about format preference, not quality.
"I said it wasn't my favorite experience although the show itself is fantastic and the team that made it are talented and that Zooey Deschanel is an absolute gem of a human and said I got to play with my friend, Rob Reiner, as exes and that was sweet and lovely."
Curtis closed the post with a firm full stop: "So please, let's not waste clicks and comments and just move on to WAY more important things. That will be all."
The panel where Curtis made the original remarks was focused on "Newlyweds," which she said draws on her own marriage to actor and filmmaker Christopher Guest. Curtis told the audience the couple spent no more than 72 hours together before getting engaged.
"There wasn't a lot of talking. And we married each other. We were strangers when we married."
The couple has now been married 42 years. Curtis described the show's premise with enthusiasm, saying there is "something really delicious about watching people figure out life when they are filled in a life with other people."
She was clearly in promotion mode, gushing about the live-audience energy of multi-camera comedy, the format "Newlyweds" uses, when the contrast with her "New Girl" experience slipped out. "We are having so much fun and the audiences are loving it," she wrote on Instagram about the new show.
The episode follows a well-worn script in celebrity media: an unguarded comment at a press event, a wave of online reaction, and a social-media cleanup within 24 hours. Curtis's Instagram post tried to do two things at once, acknowledge the remark and minimize it. She called it a "flip comment" while also restating the substance of what she said. The show was great. The people were great. The format was not for her.
Whether audiences buy the walk-back or remember the original quote is another matter. Hollywood veterans know that press tours sell shows, and candor, even the accidental kind, can overshadow the product. Curtis has a new comedy to launch in October. The last thing she needed was a news cycle about an old one.
In the end, Curtis told the public exactly what she thought and then told them to stop paying attention to it. That rarely works, but at 67, with an Oscar on the shelf and a 42-year marriage behind her, she may not care much either way.
