Prince Behind The Scenes Of 'New Girl' Was Even Princier

New Girl fetched a weirdly high caliber of guest stars, from Jamie Lee Curtis and Rob Reiner as the girl in question's parents to Taylor Swift in a quick "Hey, wait a minute ..." cameo as a wedding objector ... 

... but few sitcoms have stars as, well, starry as Zoe Deschanel, so it's not entirely surprising that her friends would tag along. But few sitcoms get Prince. Scratch that: No sitcoms get Prince -- his only other scripted TV credit is a 1997 appearance on Muppets Tonight, of all things -- which is why it was so shocking to see the New Girl gang end up at Prince's house, where he took hours out of his own party to counsel Nick and Jess through their romantic troubles in a most Princey way.

What the hell? Does even Zoe Deschanel have Prince connections? Nope, she sure doesn't. She was as shocked as anyone when, "one September day," she received "the most on-brand ... like too on-brand" email from Prince's manager informing her that Prince was obsessed with her show, watched it every week with his band, and wanted "2 b" involved. (According to co-star Jake Johnson, he specifically wanted to do something to help Nick and Jess get together because when you're Prince, your ships are less hopes than plans.) She actually didn't believe the email was real and "had several people check it out," but even after the offer proved legit and they'd written up scripts and everything, they were still kind of nervous that he just wouldn't show up. When does Prince ever just show up?

When he did, it didn't get less weird. For the party scenes, the New Girl crew enlisted several celebrities who were passable as Prince party guests to make appearances, but after Prince's camp found out that would include a few Kardashians, a production assistant ran around frantically collecting every script, call sheet, and every other scrap of evidence in the house and took it out back to burn in a bonfire she'd apparently built at some point before Prince could find out. So ... who knows what's going on there.

When Prince finally arrived, obviously, he made an entrance. He descended from a staircase along with an entourage of seven, all dressed in purple, all walking single file. At the bottom of the stairs, one of them simply nodded at Deschanel to approach while everyone else stood around in awe. They talked for a minute, and then Prince announced, "I would like to meet Nick now." Not "I would like to meet Jake," the name of the actor who plays Nick. According to him, Prince refused to address him as anything other than "Nick." Then he filmed his part and went home, having accomplished what he was arguably best at doing: Giving people a great story about meeting Prince.

Top image: 20th Television