’New Girl.’ Photo: FOX

After New Girl shocked fans last month with the breakup of the show’s central couple, Jess and Nick, the show’s creator Liz Meriwether says that coming up, she’s looking forward to returning to the lighthearted and goofy shenanigans of the show’s early days. “I think this year we got a little heavy, we got a little into that emotional arc, and I think this show completely exists without all that heaviness,” Meriwether told Vulture last night at a benefit gala for the nonprofit theater Ars Nova. “We’re having a chance to get back to basics and sort of reset the show, and kind of go back to the dynamics of the first season and the pilot, where it’s just this group of friends who are having fun … I think it might actually be good for the show to return to the kind of fun of it.”

After dropping the breakup bombshell in March, Meriwether said she has largely steered clear of social media (and the wrath of dejected Jess-Nick shippers). “I was about to press the Twitter button on my phone, and then I was like, ‘I can’t do it yet,’” she said. “So maybe in, like, a week I’ll be able to do it.” But no matter how fans feel about the breakup, Meriwether said that she and the show’s writers don’t have a far-reaching master plan in mind for Jess and Nick. “We don’t plan a lot of stuff out,” she said. “If it just feels right, we do it, so I think the fans are always kind of like ‘What? What just happened?’ But that’s a good thing to have going on. I think if you can see it coming, you’re immediately over it, so it’s better to keep the surprises coming.”