'New Girl' writer describes working with Prince: 'He made his own light'

"I think Prince is magic," Jess tells her roommates on New Girl. 

"I've always thought Prince was magic," Nick replies.

When New Girl creator and writer Liz Meriwether spoke to Prince's representatives, they told her he was a big fan of the show. His guest appearance in Season 3 came after he declined to be on the show earlier, after Meriwether wrote and rewrote the episode to secure her star.

In a guest column for Vulture, Meriwether recalled the weeks she spent working with Prince and his artistic eminence and discipline.

The Season 3 episode, appropriately titled "Prince," aired after the 2014 Super Bowl. Jess and Cece are invited to a party at Prince's house (which the rest of the loftmates try to crash), and as the night progresses Jess cops not being able to say "I love you" to Nick.

"Prince liked the idea that he would be the one to get Jess to tell Nick how she felt about him," Meriwether wrote. "He told us he wanted the party on the show to be as close as possible to what parties at his house were really like. I couldn’t believe this was happening."

They communicated through managers and emails as industry members do. "An email from Prince was like a message that had been beamed down from a party in space by a robot whose job it was to communicate during all space parties," Meriwether recalled.

Four days before the shoot, Prince changed his mind over a rewrite in which Nick and Jess declared themselves not at his party, but back at their apartment.

"At that moment, talking to Prince, it was obvious: He had to be the catalyst of Jess’s emotional breakthrough. That was the reason for the episode. That was the good stuff, and I had taken that away," Meriwether wrote. She sprinted to her laptop to rewrite the episode, and Prince agreed to stay on.

In the column, Meriweather noted how involved Prince was in every aspect of the shooting. 

In one scene, Prince locks Jess in a dark room to help her face her fears. He pulls out a lighter in the dark, but Meriwether originally wrote it as a flashlight. He pulled her aside on set and tried the scene with a lighter to see if it was funnier.

"We were still standing in the dark with only a lighter between us," Meriwether wrote. "I think he kept the light on for my benefit, because nothing could have ever stopped Prince from being able to see in the dark. He made his own light."

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