Devi’s glamorous older cousin Kamala (Richa Moorjani) weighs an arranged marriage versus dating an American college boy. Never Have I Ever shares narrative DNA with lots of other teen stories (including Netflix’s own movies like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and The Kissing Booth), but it’s also smartly informed by Devi’s status as a first-generation Indian-American daughter of immigrant parents. And as Devi’s quest to be popular winds up pushing her apart from both her friends and her mother Nalini (Poorna Jagannathan), she’s also asked to make us empathize with a character who’s acting out and hurting people she loves. Kaling and Fisher put a whole lot on her shoulders, including slapstick, teen angst, and a seemingly hopeless crush on hot jock Paxton (Darren Barnet). You would not know it to watch her completely confident and natural lead performance. Ramakrishnan is a novice actor who responded to an open casting call Kaling announced on social media. During a scene where Devi and her friends do Kegel exercises and try to learn about sexual positions using stuffed animals, he confesses, “Hey, this was really uncomfortable for me to watch.” And the show has a lot of fun juxtaposing his middle-aged male energy with these teenage girls. (*) No spoilers for why McEnroe is our narrator, but it makes sense when the explanation comes. It’s pleasantly surprising, and very satisfying to watch throughout. Here, she and Fisher aim for what’s real. In the past, if there was a choice in a scene between a good joke or an emotionally honest moment, Kaling tended to choose the joke. There’s still plenty of humor to be found in Devi’s adolescence - particularly in a device that finds the story narrated by, of all people, tennis legend John McEnroe(*) - but it’s a far more straightforward and heartfelt coming-of-age tale. Never Have I Ever isn’t nearly as funny as Kaling’s other work. In that moment, a viewer couldn’t be blamed for assuming the new show would feel like a Mindy Project prequel, toggling back and forth between big laughs and uneven attempts to make us care about an emotional journey. The first episode of Kaling’s new Netflix series, Never Have I Ever (which she co-created with Mindy Project alum Lang Fisher), literally has a friend of its high school heroine Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) warn her, “You know you sound like a sociopath, right?” Devi - a sophomore outcast still reeling from the death of her father Mohan (Sendhil Ramamurthy), and only just recovered from the paralysis she suffered in that tragedy’s wake - has just laid out her elaborate plan for her and her friends to acquire boyfriends, lose their virginity, and become popular, and Eleanor (Ramona Young) and Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez) are understandably worried that she seems way too intense.
(In Greene’s great Office oral history, Lee Eisenberg says, “Mindy would write the most gay version of Michael,” while Justin Spitzer says, “Mindy’s Michael was more feminine.”) My colleague Andy Greene suggests Kaling’s version of Michael was a bit more vulnerable and needy than that of some of her peers. (*) To be fair, The Office had this problem with Michael, who could behave wildly differently depending on who wrote that week’s episode. At times, the fictional Mindy could come across as a pure sociopath, which made it hard to reinvest in her love life. And whatever momentum Kaling built up on the more sincere end of things could be wiped out in an instant by a punchline that was too funny to cut, no matter how it reflected on Mindy Lahiri or one of her colleagues(*). The show could be riotously funny, but it was also trying to be a romantic comedy and a character study of a woman struggling to grow up without losing the things that were uniquely her. That situation wasn’t her fault, obviously, but her next series, The Mindy Project (which she both wrote and starred in), had a weakness for doing that without the help of meddling network executives.
Never have i ever tv#
But it feels oddly appropriate that the most beloved episode of TV she’s written so far in an impressive career was greeted at the time with complaints that it was sacrificing characterization for punchlines. Kaling was glad that episode’s reputation eventually did a 180.
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