Stealing the Show

by Joy Press

  In response, Meriwether cowrote (with Luvh Rakhe) the season-one episode “Jess and Julia,” in which Nick’s sarcastic lawyer girlfriend Julia (Lizzy Caplan) stands in for all the Zooey haters. She offers to help Jess get out of a parking ticket, but then is tweepulsed when Jess explains that she ran a red light because there was an injured bird in the street. “A judge might buy into this whole thing,” Julia snipes. “Those big, beautiful eyes, like a scared baby. I’m sure that gets you out of all kinds of stuff.” Jess holds her tongue until late in the episode, when she can stand Julia’s condescension no more.

  “I brake for birds. I rock a lot of polka dots. I have touched glitter in the last twenty-four hours. I spend my entire day talking to children . . .” Jess lets rip, her scared baby eyes even wider than usual. “I’m sorry I don’t talk like Murphy Brown, and I hate your pantsuit and I wish it had ribbons on it to make it slightly cuter. And that doesn’t mean I’m not smart and tough and strong.” And with that femi-ninja wo-manifesto, New Girl exorcised its manic-pixie demons and moved on. The monologue distinguishes the more fluid, twenty-first-century choose-your-own-adventure feminism from the padded-shoulder assertiveness of the Murphy Brown era, while making clear that Jess is more than a quirked-out blank slate for nerd-boy fantasies. She’s a career woman, ultimately rising to become a school principal; she has opinions and desires of her own, strange as they might be. (Take her description of an intense sexual experience: “I left my body, went up to heaven, saw my grandparents, thought it was weird that I saw my grandparents, came back down.”)

  As the show settled into a madcap groove, and Jess found a comfortable medium between Etsy goddess and screwball comedian, the show’s writers started to prick holes in masculinity, too. In “Injured,” Nick drops his hard-bitten veneer when he confronts the possibility that he has cancer; later in the season, Schmidt breaks his penis (enabling a plaster-penis-cast gag), and Winston suffers from PMS. By this point, it’s becoming clear that none of these guys is what he initially seemed. Schmidt is less bro than former fat kid encasing his neuroses in the armor of a hard gym body. Nick is a damaged soul terrified of failure who carries his money around in a baggie; and Winston’s an empath in search of truth and usefulness, which he will eventually find as a cop. The crisis of modern masculinity—the difficulty faced by young males who don’t know what being a man is supposed to involve nowadays—is played for tender laughs.

  “Dave and I think of ourselves as broken and failed men in a lot of ways,” says Brett Baer, sitting next to Dave Finkel in one of the New Girl writers’ rooms. “So there is probably a willingness to admit that, in a masculine American world, we don’t got it going on. We definitely approach those characters as failures in their own minds who couldn’t accomplish the things they wanted to accomplish.”

  The week I visit New Girl’s headquarters, the writers are working on a season-five episode in which Schmidt has a humiliating interaction that provokes him to organize a classic macho bachelor party rather than the sophisticated metrosexual soiree he’d prefer. “We joke around a lot here that Schmidt’s relationship with Nick is a romance,” Baer says. “Not a bromance—a straight-up romance. I can’t speak for every man, but the guys I work with, my partner, Dave—it is a real marriage. That’s not always something that gets elucidated on television.”

  * * *

  While Tina Fey made the unorthodox choice to spurn romance between her two central characters, Meriwether quickly decided that Jess and Nick would fall in love. Jess looks like she is made of sunshine, whereas Nick looks like he never changes his underwear: perfect odd couple. Sitcoms invariably stretch out sexual tension between primary characters for as many seasons as possible, and that was the New Girl writers’ original plan, too. The script for the season-two episode “Cooler” didn’t have Nick and Jess kissing at all—but when it came time to shoot the last scene, right before Christmas break, the chemistry between Deschanel and Jake Johnson was overwhelming.

  Meriwether ran on set and told them to go for it. “It felt dishonest not to do the kiss based on what we led ourselves to in that episode,” Finkel recalls. “How could we not do it? Which I think is what made that moment really powerful for fans of the show. They were feeling what we were feeling.”

  A great fan of rom-coms, Meriwether nevertheless realized too late that television narratives require a kind of long-term thinking different from that of movies: “It doesn’t end when they come together. Having to continue to tell the story was difficult, and it changed the tone of the comedy. Suddenly, all of Nick’s flaws were very amplified. He was now her boyfriend, so all this stuff that seemed hilarious got really dark. Oh no, he’s an alcoholic and he doesn’t have a checking account—he’s actually a really messed-up guy!”

  The series’ other odd coupling, Schmidt and Cece, emerged accidentally. Finkel says, “We just put them together in an episode because we thought it would be funny for her to be treating him like a dog. She literally leaves him in the car while she goes into a club. But she made him funnier, and he made her funnier. He’s not just a douche bag now, he’s a douche bag who falls really in love. We knew, Oh, my God, we’ve got to keep doing this.”

  Meriwether enjoyed playing with the formal limitations of the comedy genre to keep the series speeding in fresh directions. But it turns out that viewers don’t always want a sitcom spinning too far out of its familiar orbit. In season three, the writers’ decision to break up Schmidt and Cece and have him date two women backfired. “We were very excited about that in the writers’ room,” Meriwether remembers. “Schmidt is going to be this evil person! And the audience just hated it. It didn’t occur to me that if you are turning on a show after a long day of work, you don’t necessarily want to see these characters radically change. You want to see the same thing. For that moment in season three, we thought of ourselves as a cable show—and it didn’t work.”

  Ratings dropped to an all-time low that season. Some execs suggested there was not enough “guy energy” to attract male viewers; they wanted more stories about bros out in the city getting laid, Meriwether recalls. “There really was this huge pressure on: how are we going to get more men to watch this show? It was this sort of impossible task where we are all trying to brainstorm ways to get people to watch the show—people who I think were never going to watch it in the first place.” By the end of that season, Meriwether says everything finally “imploded.” The writers scrapped the finale script after the actors’ table read, and then tossed another version of the script a few days before the episode was scheduled to shoot. “It all was sort of falling apart, and it became clear everything had to change. I was sleeping at the office a lot, and everything was down to the wire because my philosophy was if there is a minute in the day, we are going to be working and using it to work on the show.”

  In the end, members of the New Girl team mounted something akin to a showrunner intervention. The actors and writers were burned out. According to Baer, Meriwether was told that “ ‘you can’t keep doing this, you will kill us. It’s jokes, alt jokes, improvisation, more jokes.’ ” Meriwether admits, “I am such a workaholic that it actually took people saying that the show wasn’t as good anymore for me to reassess the whole process. It was hard for me to take a step back and delegate more. The crazy thing about being a showrunner is that everyone is looking to you like, ‘What do you want? How do you want to do this?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, I just wrote some stuff!’ ” she says self-deprecatingly. “I just try to keep listening to people. It’s a thing that is in motion.”

  * * *

  While New Girl was making its debut in the fall of 2011, Mindy Kaling was hatching a sitcom of her own. After six years as a writer and actress on The Office, the thirty-two-year-old had become a “girl crush” for young women all over America. She’d shared her thoughts on fashion in her blog, Things I’ve Bought That I Love, and tossed out pop-culture bon mots on Twitter. Kaling had also published Is Everyone Hangin
g Out Without Me?, her best-selling memoir about growing up an Indian American comedy nerd. The book documents the way she kickstarted her own career by cowriting and starring in Matt and Ben, an Off-Off Broadway show in which she played a fictionalized version of Ben Affleck to her best friend Brenda’s Matt Damon. Producer Greg Daniels had seen Matt and Ben and invited the young Kaling to come write for his new adaptation of a British mockumentary, The Office. She was the only woman on a writing staff of eight.

  Sitting in a coffee shop near her Los Angeles home in November 2011, Kaling told me that she was writing a pilot for NBC in which she would star as a gynecologist. “My mom is an ob-gyn, and I have so many years of detail I can access for that job,” she gushed. “Being a woman who loves other women and talks to my girlfriends every day, I think—without sounding too into myself—I would be a dream ob-gyn.” Kaling dismissed the idea that network prime time wasn’t ready for story lines involving stirrups and yeast infections. “I think we’d talk about that stuff as much as we talk about paper on The Office. It’s a setting that allows a constant flow of women,” she continued, rattling off a list of female comedians she’d like to have on as guest stars.

  Acknowledging that it might be a bit premature to discuss her show before it had been picked up, Kaling added, “I have this tendency to get overconfident about things. I’d rather be the kind of person who’ll get overexcited and be devastated”—which is exactly what happened. NBC passed on her pilot script. Succumbing to devastation isn’t Kaling’s style, though. Instead, she sent the script to Fox chief Kevin Reilly, who had nurtured 30 Rock and New Girl. He picked up It’s Messy (as Kaling’s comedy was then called) with a few caveats: he wanted a stronger male lead, and he suggested her character be called Mindy. Industry journalists gossiped that Reilly envisaged Kaling as the next Tina Fey.

  One of several new comedies about single women premiering in the fall of 2012, The Mindy Project pilot stuck out like a gaudy neon sign plunked in the middle of a minimalist art gallery. Nothing about Dr. Mindy Lahiri’s character is quiet or understated: she is a grown-up version of Willie Wonka’s Veruca Salt, grabbing what she wants with reckless glee. A curvy Indian American gynecologist, Mindy rocks sparkly, skin-tight dresses with the cockiness of a supermodel. She knows how sexy she is, and she’s not afraid to flirt with NBA players. Her expectations for men are also impossibly high. Before one date, she prays, “Dear Lord, may he have the wealth of Mayor Bloomberg, the personality of Jon Stewart, the face of Michael Fassbender”—not forgetting “the penis of Michael Fassbender.”

  As the first woman of color to create, write, and star in her own network television show, Kaling might’ve felt historic pressure to make her central character a positive role model—or, at the least, admirable. But, nope. In the pilot, we watch Mindy have a drunken meltdown at her ex-boyfriend’s wedding and ride a bike into a swimming pool. An ob-gyn at a Manhattan practice, she seems to devote very little time to patient care: at one point, Mindy asks a hospital supervisor, “Am I in trouble because I might have lost a press-on nail in that woman?”

  Kaling is proud to have created the first Indian American sitcom heroine, she tells me now. “The tricky thing was that because of that, people insisted that Mindy Lahiri represent all Indian women, or all Asian women, which I resisted.” Why should she, Kaling demands, when The Office’s Michael Scott or Eastbound & Down’s Kenny Powers are allowed to be their ludicrous selves without standing in for all white males? For her new show, Kaling wanted to create a heroine driven by the self-confidence, sexual avarice, and tactlessness usually available only to male characters like these. “To me, the truly pioneering thing about Mindy Lahiri as a comedic lead was not that she was Indian but that she was so flawed.”

  Likability has long been a requirement for female characters, and a confining one at that. When an interviewer told author Claire Messud that the protagonist of her novel The Woman Upstairs was not good friend material, Messud lashed back with a litany of great male antiheroes and assholes, from Humbert Humbert to Hamlet to Oedipus. “The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?,’ but ‘Is this character alive?’ ”

  Kaling agrees that “likability can be a poisonous word, because so often it’s attached to outdated standards for what is appealing about female characters for men. Sweetness, being agreeable, being put upon, having straight long hair, et cetera. Those are all likable qualities. Who cares? What is important to me is making a character relatable. Being able to relate to the character is everything, whether they are sweet and agreeable or not.”

  Dr. Mindy Lahiri constantly imagines herself at the center of a rom-com in which all eyes are on her. That’s not so different from Jane Austen heroines such as Emma Woodhouse and Catherine Morland, who trip themselves up by projecting fantasies absorbed from romantic novels onto their ordinary lives. (Austen once described Emma as “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.”) Rom-coms are often denigrated as fluffy chick flicks, but The Mindy Project regularly pays its respects to the genre by winking at rom-com lore lifted from movies such as When Harry Met Sally and Bridget Jones’s Diary. In one episode, Mindy hangs out at the Empire State Building hoping to meet the love of her life à la Sleepless in Seattle, but is instead mistaken for a terrorist. “I know it’s dangerous,” she cluelessly tells the suspicious security guard, “but I am a true believer.”

  Kaling’s ambition quickly hit some stumbling blocks. The Mindy Project’s tiny writing staff was overstretched; she was doing double duty as showrunner and star, as was Ike Barinholtz, a writer who had also been drafted to play wacky nurse Morgan Tookers. Episodes were being scratched and totally rewritten after rehearsals.

  “They were so in the weeds,” recalls Tracey Wigfield. “They did twenty-four episodes their first season, and I think they were halfway through when they realized, We just need more people in the room!” So, when 30 Rock came to an end, Jack Burditt moved to LA to join Kaling as a co-showrunner on The Mindy Project; his 30 Rock colleagues Wigfield and Lang Fisher soon followed.

  Yet problems remained. Although The Mindy Project was supposed to be an ensemble comedy, every other character paled in comparison to Kaling’s own ultravivid personality. (And yes, they were mostly pale-skinned as well.) Macho Dr. Danny Castellano (Chris Messina) quickly fell into place as a perfect romantic sparring partner for Mindy. But the other officemates never really came into sharp enough focus. “Writing 30 Rock, it felt much more like an ensemble show,” Wigfield admits. “On Mindy, for me, she was the fun character to write. It was a show about this woman.”

  Even more than a doctor problem, The Mindy Project had a woman problem. Dr. Mindy Lahiri started out with several female associates and a best friend named Gwen (Anna Camp), but those roles soon vanished or withered to bit parts until the series was basically Mindy surrounded by handsome white men. “That was a network thing,” Wigfield suggests. “They were saying: ‘Now Mindy should have a bunch of friends.’ ‘No, now the show should be all about work!’ ” The female patients at the gynecology practice also tailed off late in the first season. Lang Fisher says, “Grey’s Anatomy can get away with it because they are drama. For comedy, [the execs] were like, ‘Nah, we don’t want to see anyone sick, anyone hurt, anyone having problems.’ ” It turned out the networks really didn’t want to partake in “peak vagina.”

  Fisher laughs as she recalls discussions about how to bring in more male viewers. “Hey, network, guess what? Men are not going to watch a show about a gynecologist’s office no matter what you do!” she shouts. “We are never going to get the Sports Center crowd to tune into the show . . . but, yeah, we had to just keep adding guys.”

  Like 30 Rock and New Girl, The Mindy Project unraveled the single-girl sitcom in ways that felt startlingly fresh and disconcertingly unstable. “If you don’t like an episode of The Mindy Project . . . tune in a week later, because the show will probably be something completely different,” critic Todd VanDerWerff quip
ped in the A.V. Club. The show’s chameleonic urge went into overdrive midway through season three, when the writers decided to break off Mindy’s budding love affair with Danny and send her on a prestigious fellowship to Stanford. So the woman more obsessed with shoes than scalpels is actually a talented physician?

  “While she comes across as a flibbertigibbet and sometimes she says inappropriate things, when she is in the operating room delivering babies or with a patient, she knows her stuff,” Fisher explains. “It was important to remind the audience, and also remind us, that she is a student who worked really hard to get where she is—that doesn’t go away, and you still want to be the best.”

  Kaling’s own immigrant parents had instilled an intense work ethic in her. She realized that her lead character’s ambition ought to feel as oversize as her hunger for romance. By the end of Mindy’s fellowship, she has decided to open her own fertility clinic—and discovered that she’s pregnant with Danny’s baby. Ever confident in her own abilities, she resists Danny’s request that she stop working. “A woman can have professional ambitions and still have a family,” Mindy insists. “I mean, rich women.”

  Just as 30 Rock mocked the hypocrisy of Liz Lemon’s white feminism and New Girl commented on adorkability, The Mindy Project occasionally acknowledged class privilege. Yet Mindy Lahiri is a woman of color, which means that every so often—despite her many white friends and colleagues, and her refusal of identity politics—she becomes the target of mundane racism. For instance, Danny’s mom assumes she’s a maid the first time she meets her, and a professor mistakes her for Nobel Prize–winning activist Malala Yousafzai (something that actually happened to Kaling at a party).