Like Kaling herself, “The Mindy Project’s” Mindy character fell hard in childhood for romantic comedies of the 1990s, including those made by the late writer/ director Nora Ephron, who is not mentioned in the show but whose presence and sensibility are faintly detectable, just as they are in Lena Dunham’s HBO series, “Girls.” Oblivious to the utter whiteness (and blondness) of such fare, childhood Mindy, in Coke-bottle glasses and diligently doing her homework on the couch, chirps out “I’ll have what she’s having!” along with her umpteenth viewing of the fake-orgasm scene from “When Harry Met Sally” on cable.
This habit continues through college and hospital residencies in young adulthood. She keeps adding to the canon, through “Notting Hill” and “27 Dresses.” Now in her 30s, Mindy’s life is just a half-organized Pinterest board of hopes and dreams of finding a dream mate by “meeting cute,” while she copes with instant-gratification issues via quick sex with Jeremy (Ed Weeks), a perpetually wanton obstetrician who works at the same medical practice. “Maybe I’ll never get married,” Mindy says and instead choose the path of “One of those ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ things. Ugh, no. I don’t want to pray. Forget it. I’ll just die alone.”
Hank Stuever
Hank Stuever is The Washington Post’s TV critic and author of two books, “Tinsel” and “Off Ramp.”
After delivering a drunken yet honest anti-toast at the wedding of her ex-boyfriend (“Saturday Night Live’s” Bill Hader, in a cameo), Mindy has a rough night and must be bailed out of jail by a friend (Anna Camp). Here she vows to undertake a regimen of self-improvement in all things, especially romance. All Mindy wants is a man with “the wealth of Mayor Bloomberg, the personality of Jon Stewart and the face of Michael Fassbender. [Pause.] And the penis of Michael Fassbender.”
But “The Mindy Project’s” knight in shining armor is well-disguised, in the form of another doctor, Danny Castellano (Chris Messina, who excels at playing jerks). “You know what would really look great?” Danny tells Mindy as she polls her co-workers on whether her outfit is appropriate for a blind date. “If you lost 15 pounds.” His brute honesty is an unwelcome but necessary step in Mindy’s project toward finding her true self.
But “The Mindy Project” is only partly about a loser. Although it is marred slightly by a voice-over narrative style (a lazy storytelling technique that one hopes burns off in a couple of episodes) and has guest stars such as Hader and “The Office’s” Ed Helms offering Kaling a boost up that she hardly needs, the show is a worthy character study of a complicated, slightly deranged woman.
When Mindy gets an emergency page to get to the hospital for a patient’s breech birth, she doffs her date heels and runs barefoot through the streets to save the day, to the thumping anthem of M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls,” with the spectral notions of those Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock and Katherine Heigl characters hot on her trail. Whether or not she gets her fairy-tale ending, Mindy is someone you’ll fall for.
The Mindy Project
(30 minutes) premieres at 9:30 p.m. Sept. 25 on Fox.
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