In our new series Stream Team, Guardian Australia’s arts writers dig out their favourite hidden gems of streaming to help you while away some isolated hours. You’ve probably assumed the worst about New Girl. The Zooey Deschanel-starring sitcom, which debuted in 2011 to an aggressively mild critical response, is not the kind of show one thinks of when reeling off a list of classic sitcoms. In terms of optics, it basically scans as another piece of aggressively twee early-2010s ephemera, something to push to the recesses of the mind alongside Gorman raincoats and Mumford & Sons. And admittedly, for a little while, that’s all it was. Starring Deschanel as a recently dumped 30-something who moves into an apartment with three guys she met on Craigslist, the show – created by playwright Liz Meriwhether – seemed intent, initially, on making Deschanel’s character Jess little more than a twee cipher: a nerdy, doe-eyed craft obsessive who acted like the grown-up version of a John Green protagonist. I’ll be the first to admit that in its arch, ham-fisted early episodes, New Girl is rarely worth keeping the tab open for. But give it some time to get over its teething issues and to gain some self-awareness and New Girl – streaming in full on SBS on Demand – quickly gets sharper, funnier and a lot less cloying. The show’s early format, where Jess is a cutesy wacko and her roommates – Max Greenfield’s Schmidt, Jake Johnson’s Nick and Lamorne Morris’ Winston – are three perpetually disgruntled normal-guy onlookers, is quickly ditched in favour of something weirder and more comedically balanced, becoming a show about four broke, down-on-their-luck lunatics who are never far away from some kind of incomprehensible chaos. Episode-by-episode, the show’s first season gets exponentially better, introducing bizarre drinking games and new romantic interests (a tough lawyer girlfriend for Nick played by Lizzy Caplan; a refined older boyfriend for Jess played by Dermot Mulroney) who serve to expose the childish, facile natures of the show’s main characters. As we see the dishevelled Nick obsess over Mulroney’s rich, urbane Russell, and the polka dot-clad Jess fight with Caplan’s Julia, the show begins to prove itself as a surprisingly canny interrogator of all the varying, and conflicting, shades of masculinity and femininity that exist in the world. By the time the second season hits, each of the main four characters is unhinged in their own right: Jess becomes a delusional smart-ass; Nick starts acting like a curmudgeonly old man in the body of a 30-something; Schmidt, a persnickety, image-obsessed sociopath; and Winston, a moderately dim-witted prankster. (The addition to the writing room of Kay Cannon – the writer of many of 30 Rock’s best episodes – was, in all likelihood, a significant driver of New Girl’s uptick in quality.) Soon, the show becomes faster and more insane, each of the four main actors proving themselves gifted physical comedians able to play off each other with ease. At its best, New Girl reminds me of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, another – admittedly much more risque – show about four unhinged, spiteful lunatics trying to scrap through life. In fact, certain plotlines feel directly lifted from the show – such as one in which Winston and Jess ransack their own apartments to cover up the fact that they ruined Schmidt’s clothes. As the series progresses, it settles into some pleasingly zany rhythms, its writers clearly becoming cognisant of the fact that New Girl is funniest when its key quartet is allowed to run riot in one space. Against all odds, I’ve watched New Girl in its entirety multiple times over the past few years: slightly more acidic than basic comfort food like Friends, and not as conceptually dense as, say, Arrested Development, it strikes a good balance between smart and undemanding. It might strike as ephemera, but New Girl has surprising staying power.