King of Kissing
Jake Johnson Is TV’s Best Kisser
Jake Johnson is TV’s best kisser. Now, there are quite a few people who would agree with this statement, but that doesn’t mean they’d be able to entirely explain their reasoning. This isn’t a bold take, but nearly a year after pitching this idea has left me with a lot of time to consider the argument.
First, I want to begin by saying this is an analysis as to why Jake Johnson is the best kisser on TV. This isn’t meant to objectify or judge an individual. This is some well-deserved admiration for a performer’s onscreen technique, a technique Johnson could easily teach to others for a pretty penny.
Like other TV viewers, I was introduced to Johnson’s kissing game in New Girl, where he started out as Jess’ (Zooey Deschanel) lovably goofy romantic interest, Nick Miller. But it was Season 2’s episode “Cooler” that changed everything. In the installment, Jess is left alone at the loft she shares with roommates Nick, Schmidt (Max Greenfield), and Winston (Lamorne Morris) because she’s considered a “cooler” or someone who prevents the guys from being able to pick up dates.
Fox; Lionsgate
When Jess begins to hear noises while alone, she gets scared and asks the guys to return, which is when they begin playing their made-up drinking game, True American. When one of the scenarios leads to Jess and Nick being forced to kiss, her attitude is to get it over with as quickly as possible, while Nick lets it slip he doesn’t want to kiss, “not like this.”
While they don’t initially kiss under those circumstances, the revelation lights a spark that simmers the rest of the episode until the duo finds themselves awake in the loft halls alone. As Jess bids Nick goodnight, in a stunning move, he pulls her towards him and goes straight in for a passionate kiss (a move that wouldn’t be as cool in real life; after all, consent is everything!), and there is so much to unpack from the iconic sequence.
As Johnson pulls Deschanel in, he does this move where he bends down and, in a scooping motion, lifts Deschanel ever so slightly as he reaches toward her shoulders and neck. It’s a move that is used again in the former Max (and later Starz) comedy Minx. But part of what makes New Girl‘s first kiss between Nick and Jess so magical is that after that fiery initial connection, Johnson goes back in for a more tender follow-up.
Fox
When Johnson was asked about the filming of this scene by Gold Derby in 2013, he recounted being pulled aside by showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether prior to the shoot. “Liz pulled me aside before and said, ‘Just don’t kiss her soft. Kiss her like a man.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t need notes on how to kiss a woman, Liz.’ And we had a laugh,” Johnson said at the time. Clearly he wasn’t lying. That kiss is more than 10 years old and is still captivating the audience, whether they’re tuning in for the first time or revisiting during a rewatch.
While Nick and Jess didn’t necessarily have any more kisses that met the heights of their first (although Season 6’s finale comes extremely close), Johnson clearly took his technique elsewhere when he shared an equally jaw-dropping smooch with Idara Victor in Minx, as mentioned above. If anything, Johnson revealed he’d improved upon the approach I’m going to refer to as the “scoop method.”
Playing sleazy publisher with a vaguely moral compass in the series that followed the making of a female-focused erotic magazine in the 1970s, Johnson’s Minx character Doug was in a relationship with Victor’s Tina, although it wasn’t fully revealed until later in the first season. Regarding their smooch, Johnson uses that same “scoop method,” although instead of Doug approaching Tina from level ground, he does so from a chair while she’s standing in front of him, making the move somewhat even more effective onscreen.
Netflix
Regardless of the setting or the character, it’s clear that Johnson’s onscreen kissing is sure to leave viewers swooning no matter what. Victor confirmed as much on X (formerly known as Twitter), in a response to a fan who asked, “WHO TAUGHT HIM TO DO THAT,” to which Victor replied, “I would’ve taught him 💅🏾 but he didn’t need lessons. Star student, A+ 🌟.” Considering Johnson got his former costar’s approval, we’ll trust Victor for her word.
As if the evidence isn’t enough to speak for itself, the power of Johnson’s onscreen kissing has influenced other iconic TV smooches on hit shows like Netflix‘s Shondaland hit Bridgerton. In an interview surrounding Season 3, stars Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Nick and Jess’s first kiss in the show may have influenced one of the kisses from Part 2.
The kiss, although not identified by Coughlan or Newton in the interview, seemingly references the passionate moment Penelope and Colin share out on the streets of Mayfair the night before their wedding. The photographic evidence — seen above — is almost enough to confirm the theory, but feel free to decide for yourself.
Rivals & Nobody Wants This (Hulu; Netflix)
And while there have been plenty of other great onscreen kissers, once you’ve seen Jake Johnson onscreen, you’re comparing the rest to him. That definitely seemed to be the case when Nobody Wants This debuted on Netflix and Adam Brody‘s “put your bag down” command and resulting kiss with costar Kristen Bell raised plenty of comparisons to Johnson.
“He went to the Nick Miller school of kissing omg,” one fan posted on X, reacting to Brody and Bell’s kiss as Noah and Joanne. Another fan more accurately credited Johnson in a similar sentiment as they posted, “he went to the jake johnson school of kissing like this is crazy.” And of the more recent television kisses, I’d even go so far as to compare Rupert (Alex Hassell) and Taggie’s (Bella Maclean) first kiss to Jess and Nick’s in New Girl, with Hassell implementing a similar practice to Johnson.
But as stated above, it will always come back to Johnson. He’s set a bar for his fellow television stars that will forever be hard to beat. But we don’t mind seeing Johnson’s peers try. In the meantime, if you need any more convincing surrounding this analysis, I implore you to check out the video below. And in the meantime, I inch closer to my next New Girl binge.
🥳 https://t.co/Xkrwtp2q6g pic.twitter.com/14QXQvE2KN
— 🍍francesca🍍 (@francescaaahhhh) May 28, 2024
