by Joy Press
“I love when we tackle the race and sexism stuff head-on,” Kaling tells me. “Mindy is such a confident character—I think she has stated that she has the entitlement of a tall white man, so when she isn’t treated well, that’s really fun. We did an episode called ‘Bernardo & Anita,’ where Mindy dates an Indian man who accuses her of being a ‘coconut’: dark on the outside and white on the inside. That incensed her, and it was fun exploring that with the character.” The title referenced West Side Story’s Puerto Rican couple, but Wigfield suggests that Dr. Lahiri’s “coconut” attitude was largely inspired by Kaling’s own assimilated life. After realizing how many Indian American fans yearned to see themselves reflected on TV, the writers decided to delve more deeply into Mindy’s cultural ambivalence.
* * *
During the 2015 Academy Awards, American Express ran an advertising spot called “The Unlikely Leading Lady.” As Mindy Kaling eats gummy bears for breakfast and drives to the studio set, her disembodied voice explains that, growing up, “[I] never saw someone who looked like me reflected in anything . . . I kind of realized that I had to take destiny into my own hands, and it’s the harder path and it’s grueling and it’s not glamorous. But then I control it and I own it. No one can stop you then.”
Three months later, Fox announced that it would not renew The Mindy Project for a fourth season. The series had dropped from nearly five million viewers for the pilot to just over two million with its season-three finale. Yet again, Kaling refused to take no for an answer. Within a week, The Mindy Project arose from near-death, thanks to a deal with digital streaming site Hulu.
Like Netflix and Amazon, Hulu was itching to make a name for itself with original programming. The site had already been streaming The Mindy Project in syndication, and the show had done incredibly well there, according to Hulu head of original content Beatrice Springborn, “so we knew she would be a great way to brand our originals right out of the gate.” What excited Springborn about The Mindy Project was the way its viewers, who are primarily female, “watch episodes over and over and over again. Sitcoms are typically seen as a bit throwaway, more like candy than protein. So the idea that people are consuming it over and over again—and getting something out of it on repeat viewing—is fascinating.”
Working with Hulu removed all worries about ratings from Kaling’s shoulders—showrunners at Hulu can’t get information on how many people watch each episode, even if they want to know—and also offered more freedom in terms of length, language, and format. The writers instantly took advantage in the most exultant way. Season four opened with a Sliding Doors scenario in which Mindy and Danny never fell in love and she never got pregnant. Instead, he remains her grumpy colleague, while she is married to a wealthy reality TV producer and lives in a lavish Gramercy Park apartment. When Mindy eventually snaps out of her dream, real-life Danny is kneeling by her bedside, asking her to marry him. And when she goes into labor on a subway train a few episodes later, Danny runs through the tunnel to get to her, because all the best movie heroes run furiously to get to the women they love.
Until this point, the rom-com tradition had hung over the show like a sweet, druggy haze. But in the fourth season of The Mindy Project, synapses began to fire in Mindy Lahiri’s postpartum brain. After trying out the stay-at-home-mom life, she seethes with frustration that Danny expects her to give up her job, her old apartment, and even her heritage (by raising their son Catholic).
“Every time you disagree with something I do, it’s a referendum on my character,” Mindy complains. “If I want to go to work, it means I’m a bad mother. If I want another glass of wine, it means I’m out of control . . . You get to make all the definitions.” It’s obvious that this fairy-tale romance is a goner, clearing the way for Mindy to charge back into the dating world with her brassy self-confidence restored. And motherhood also allowed The Mindy Project to shamelessly exploit the physicality of childbirth and breast-feeding. (What new mom hasn’t dreamed of spraying milk into a rude colleague’s face, as Mindy does?)
Hulu execs didn’t offer much feedback or pressure on plot or characters, so “storytelling-wise, we were able to do weirder episodes,” says Wigfield. Inspired by one of Kaling’s favorite sayings—that she has the confidence of a white man—Lang Fisher wrote an episode in which Mindy wakes up as a blond dude named Michael (played by Ryan Hansen). Concealed within Michael’s body, Mindy giddily explores the pleasures of masturbation, manspreading, and male privilege. As a woman, Dr. Lahiri did not make it to the final round of interviews for a department head position; as a less-qualified and less-hardworking man, she gets the job. “I can tell you’re a good leader just by looking at you,” one of the all-male committee members exclaims.
“Mindy has confidence not commensurate with her station in life,” Kaling suggests. “People are constantly telling her she’s not good enough, and she tries to deflect it with the confidence of Prince Harry. Obviously, she is not always successful, and it’s hard to be in her skin and always be proving herself. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to see her as she has always seen herself?’ ” In a way, it brought Mindy Lahiri full circle, back to the audacious single woman on the prowl whom we first met in the pilot—but this time, she put the cock in “cocky.”
Lang Fisher describes Kaling as the showrunner version of an Energizer Bunny, one who made her own luck and rescued her show from banishment. Although Hulu’s reach remains much smaller than Fox’s, Kaling’s popularity keeps growing because she constantly speaks to fans through social media and her books.
“When I didn’t know her, I just thought, Mindy Kaling is the luckiest person in the world because she gets to do all of this!” says Nisha Ganatra, who directed an episode in season five. “And then I worked on the show, and there is Mindy in meetings, and then she’s shooting, and then Mindy is leaving the set to go to the edit room, and then she’s waking up at four in the morning to make sure she is in the writers’ room the next day.” This juggling act is enabled by producer-director Michael Alan Spiller, who Ganatra says provides “a huge safety net for everybody,” and current co-showrunner Matt Warburton. But, at the end of the day, the burden of the series is on Kaling.
“She is such a hustler!” Fisher says, meaning it in the best possible way. “She keeps the train moving, which is how, as a woman of color, she is able to have her own show even though we did not have great ratings. There is no one else saying, You deserve to have this.” Fisher counts herself lucky to have been mentored by Fey and Kaling. “They are training the women in the room how to do that themselves—but they are also training the men to see us as real equals.”
CHAPTER 6
* * *
A Voice of a Generation:
Lena Dunham’s Girls
Lena Dunham huddles with Jenni Konner on the set of Girls during the filming of season two.
The first time I interviewed Lena Dunham, she was twenty-five, with one foot in the indie film world and the other perched on the precipice of media clusterfuckdom. It was March 2012, and after texting apologetically that she was running late, Dunham scurried down LA’s Larchmont Boulevard in a pale yellow dress, zooming past tight-bodied women carrying yoga mats and mothers pushing strollers. Sitting down at the vegan café she’d chosen, Dunham ordered a kombucha. She then pulled out a bottle of green liquid from her bag. “I’m doing a very LA thing, of drinking green juice and kombucha,” she said sheepishly, explaining that she was trying to ward off illness after succumbing to junk food in Austin. She’d just been there to premiere the first three episodes of her new HBO series Girls at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival.
Dunham’s overloaded schedule already threatened to wear her down. Immediately after our meeting, she had an appointment to take her driving test. She’d failed once before, and now that she was living bicoastally between Los Angeles and New York, she felt an intense pressure to learn. Los Angeles itself seemed to exhaust her. Dunham initially rented a house in the Hollyw
ood Hills, hoping to walk in Joan Didion’s footsteps, but the isolation freaked her out: “I was hiding under the covers and imagining all these running escape routes down the hill.” Her next stop was an old art deco apartment building in the middle of the city, but friends were convinced that the place was brimming with dissatisfied actors’ ghosts. “I have not personally seen a ghost,” she said matter-of-factly. “That being said, my sink did spit up perfect soap suds. So it could be a movie star who died in a bubble bath.”
Dunham was already an indie film darling; it was at SXSW that her low-budget movies Creative Nonfiction (2009) and Tiny Furniture (2010) got their first exposure. But the year we met, SXSW was where she first experienced overexposure, and the controversy that comes with it. She was shocked when a guy approached her after the Girls screening and told her he enjoyed Hannah, the character Dunham played, but found her sex scenes off-putting. “He thought the character could be separated from her sexual behavior, like, ‘She’d be so cute if she wasn’t such a slut!’ ” Dunham trilled.
As far as Dunham was concerned, explicit female sexuality was “a last frontier” for television—especially when it was filmed from a woman’s point of view—and she was fascinated by viewers like the one at SXSW who responded to the show’s sex scenes with revulsion. “There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me—but ‘ick’ means something,” she said thoughtfully, nodding with such force that the loose bun of hair atop her head wobbled. “It either means you’re offended politically, or you think something was morally compromised, or you find someone unattractive. So why don’t we articulate this ‘ick’ a little?”
That’s pretty much what Dunham would spend the next six years doing.
* * *
When I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, intimate depictions of women’s lives were largely nonexistent on television. Female sexual pleasure and ambivalence, contraception and pregnancy scares, periods and date rape—there was so little trace of these things in prime time that when Seinfeld designed a whole 1995 episode around Elaine Benes’s obsession with contraceptive sponges, it felt like a revelation. (The boyfriend Elaine finally decides is not “spongeworthy,” in the script’s classic coinage, was played by a young Scott Patterson, aka diner owner Luke from Gilmore Girls.)
A few years after that Seinfeld episode, Sex and the City blazed a new trail into virgin territory for television: there were debates among the four pals about anal sex and pubic hair and vibrators and infertility, as well as emotional tussles over friendship, infidelity, motherhood, and power imbalances within relationships. “We were all single at the time, and we would just tell the story of our bad date the night before,” Sex and the City writer Jenny Bicks recalls of that largely female writers’ room. “We did have a rule that any idea that we had, if it seemed outlandish, we would have to check it with other people to make sure that it was really happening. The thing was, as weird as this shit was, it was happening. That was so uplifting: to be able to write about the stuff you weren’t allowed to say before.”
By the time Sex and the City ended in 2004, women’s blogs had begun popping up across the Internet. Soon sites such as Jezebel and The Hairpin arrived to expand this emerging online space for young women to talk among themselves, making them increasingly comfortable about sharing frank details from their lives. Dunham was no different.
“I am constantly tweeting things and going, ‘Why did I just say that to the world?’ ” she told me at the Larchmont café. “I wanted to capture that feeling of there being no clear boundary anymore between public and private. And also, my characters will choose to keep really strange things private. They will share some sexual humiliation but refuse to tell their friends they lost their job. It’s an interesting thing in this culture, what we choose to keep secret.”
As a public figure in the wake of Girls’s instant success, Dunham would prove to be just as unguarded and impulsive. Her tendency to toss out provocative, unprocessed thoughts and jokes was an offshoot of her candor and unwillingness to self-censor, but it ensnared Dunham in constant controversy. The briefest trip down Google Lane yields page after page of rants and listicles with titles such as “Lena Dunham and Everything Wrong with White Feminists,” “Eleven Reasons to Dislike Lena Dunham,” and the more traditional “Hot Mess Alert! Lena Dunham Looks Like Your Crazy Aunt on a Shopping Spree.”
Dunham began inspiring Schadenfreude before she even hit high school. Her first media appearance came at the age of eleven, when she was profiled in Vogue as part of a feature focused on the fashion taste of children whose parents were New York City creatives. The daughter of acclaimed artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, precocious Lena sounded like a late-twentieth-century Eloise. “I tend not to go for trends. You can only wear them for two weeks,” she declared. Instead, for the photo spread, she wore a dress that she’d sewn herself.
Growing up surrounded by artists, Dunham always assumed that she would do something artistic. “My uncle’s a lawyer, and I remember going to see him in court and thinking, That’s cool, too bad I could never be a lawyer,” she says. In order to distance herself from her parents, though, Dunham decided to focus on words rather than images. At fourteen, she took stand-up comedy classes; the opening line of her act was, “Hi, I’m Lena, and I’m an alcoholic. Just kidding, my dad is.” As a student at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, she began writing plays. One was set in the waiting room of an abortion clinic; another, The Goldman Girls, was inspired by her mother’s Long Island childhood. Later, at Oberlin College in Ohio, she studied creative writing in the hope of being a poet. But she felt out of place and isolated there: “Oberlin is surrounded by cornfields on all sides. You just ride your bike and think and do weird experiments with your friends.”
Some of those “weird experiments” involved making videos. “Pressure” (2006), shot in the Oberlin library stacks, presents Dunham and two female students discussing orgasms and sneezes. In “The Fountain,” Dunham takes a bath in a campus fountain, clad only in a bikini. That one got more than a million hits on YouTube and, in a preview of her future, a ton of nasty comments about her chubby body.
At twenty-two, an age when the rest of us were trying to cover our zits and pen the occasional maudlin poem, Dunham made her first movie, Creative Nonfiction, about a college student trying to write a screenplay. Dunham’s influences included Woody Allen’s self-portraits of verbose neurotics and Nicole Holofcener’s intimate, female-focused indie movies. Critics filed her alongside “mumblecore” filmmakers Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski, then coming into the ascendant with microbudget, highly naturalistic movies such as Funny Ha Ha and Hannah Takes the Stairs.
Returning to New York post-Oberlin in 2008, she juggled internships and part-time jobs while trying to make more movies. Noticing that Swanberg had made a Web series for the hip sex website Nerve, Dunham successfully pitched them Tight Shots, a series about sex and dating among young filmmakers. “When I was younger I would email anyone I liked,” she says. “I had no qualms about emailing a director I admired and saying, ‘What boom mic do you use?’ ” Tight Shots was followed by The Delusional Downtown Divas, an online comedy written and starring Dunham and several of her friends as spoiled brats trawling the art world.
Tiny Furniture turned the camera even more narrowly on Dunham’s surroundings: she filmed the movie in her parents’ loft, and recruited her mother and younger sister, Grace, to effectively play themselves alongside her own character, Aura Freeman. A recent graduate, all Aura has to show for her college years is a video of her performance art piece shot in the college fountain. (Dunham used the actual video from Oberlin.) The movie’s title refers to a strand of Laurie Simmons’s feminist art, photographs of dolls and dollhouses, and in the movie, Aura obsesses over her mother’s life and work. Blithely unconcerned about invasion of privacy, she reads passages from her mother’s diary as a young woman, excerpted from Simmons’s own journal.
More or less the ch
rysalis of Girls, Tiny Furniture has aimless Aura toggling between poorly paid jobs and unromantic sex. She spends much of the movie in her underwear, exposing her pasty flesh in such a casual way it feels insurrectionary. Her attempts at sexual adventure invariably misfire. One schmucky guy (played by Alex Karpovsky, later a Girls lynchpin as the character of Ray) is willing to sleep in her bed but draws the line at having sex. And a workplace flirtation results in a rushed, doggy-style fuck inside an outdoor sewer pipe. Afterward, Aura takes a shower on her hands and knees, as if reliving the experience, and then crawls into her mother’s bed looking for comfort. The sex is consensual, but it is also humiliating.
Shot in November 2009 on a fifty-thousand-dollar budget supplied mostly by Dunham’s parents, Tiny Furniture premiered the next March at SXSW, where it won the Best Narrative Feature prize. The film was widely and glowingly reviewed; it would eventually become part of the prestigious Criterion Collection. “It is Ms. Dunham’s refusal to put on a pretty show, to doll herself up, that is the movie’s boldest stroke,” Manohla Dargis declared in her New York Times review. In its anti-aesthetic of “unlovely, unadorned, badly lighted digital images,” Dargis saw Tiny Furniture as the vanguard of a new kind of feminist cinema verité.
Dunham started to take meetings in Hollywood. Her big break came about in an unusual way. A fan of Laurie Simmons’s artwork, HBO’s entertainment chief Sue Naegle watched Tiny Furniture while she was on a camping vacation with her kids. In the cabin next door was her friend Jenni Konner, a writer/producer who had worked with Judd Apatow on his cult series Undeclared as well as on her own short-lived series Help Me Help You and In the Motherhood. “I finished watching Tiny Furniture and I knocked on Jenni’s cabin door and said, ‘Do you have your laptop?’ ” Naegle recalls. “ ‘You need to watch this right away; it’s fantastic!’ ” Konner was equally captivated.