Liz Meriwether, the creator of New Girl, has spent a career finding stories in the way people talk to one another. As a Greenhills student, she performed in Duo Interpretation and Dramatic Interpretation at the MIFA State Finals.
By then she had already written her first play. She wrote it as a Yale sophomore, and it starred a fellow undergraduate nobody had heard of yet named Zoe Kazan.
A publisher's daughter
Meriwether was born in Miami and moved to Ann Arbor at ten, the daughter of Heath J. Meriwether, publisher of the Detroit Free Press, and Patricia Hughes Meriwether, a painter. She went to Greenhills, then to Yale, where (after first thinking she wanted to act) she found she wanted to write instead. A string of small productions followed: Heddatron, The Mistakes Madeline Made, a play called Oliver Parker! that opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre.
"If I'm writing something and I'm not feeling mischievous, then I know it's not going to be great," she said of her process. "I love writing stuff where they can really lose control."
New Girl and after
Meriwether's first produced screenplay was No Strings Attached, a 2011 Paramount comedy starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher. The same year, Fox premiered New Girl, which she created and ran for seven seasons and 146 episodes, the show that made her a name, and the one most people still associate with her first.
She didn't stop at one. Bless This Mess and Single Parents followed on ABC. Then, in 2022, The Dropout, a limited series about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos that Meriwether has described as closer to a dark comedy than a thriller. It earned her two personal Emmy nominations, for producing and for writing. Dying for Sex, co-created with her longtime collaborator Kim Rosenstock and starring Michelle Williams, followed in 2025 and won her a WGA Award. A new series, Furious, a crime thriller loosely inspired by the 1987 film noir Black Widow, starring Emmy Rossum, premiered on Hulu in 2026, and Meriwether is currently writing a Britney Spears biopic for Universal, based on Spears's memoir.
Nearly two decades after her first deal, she re-signed her overall agreement with 20th Television in 2026, a relationship approaching twenty years with the same studio, in an industry that doesn't usually run that way.
What the record doesn't say
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
