I have been a fan of the Office in general and Mindy Kaling in particular so when I noticed the pilot episode of The Mindy Project was available on On Demand, I checked it out. Unfortunately it was pretty awful.
It is set in a hospital which already makes it seem somewhat played out and it is full of characters, including Mindy herself, who are supposed to be charmingly insufferable but are instead just insufferable, alternating between douchey and pathetic.
Worse still, the jokes just aren’t funny. I think I may have smirked once or twice during the entire half hour but I never really laughed. I was very surprised how badly this turned out because her work on the Office was good. I have a feeling when this crashes and burns, Kelly will be back at Dunder-Mifflin.
The Office is on my “someday I’ll watch that” list so I don’t know Kaling’s work on that show. I did listen to a few chapters of a book written and read by her not long ago - impulse grab at the library. She paused as she read as if waiting for the laugh. It made me kind of uncomfortable in my own car. It was humorous, but not laugh out loud funny, at least in the beginning. It wasn’t compelling enough to go back to.
I’d seen teasers for the show and thought it might be funny. I assumed that we were seeing clips from a whole season. Prompted by this very thread I watched the pilot this morning. Turns out that every single moment that I’ve already seen in ads was in this one episode. I was underwhelmed. In general I like Steven Tobolowsky, who appears to play her boss (unless we’re to believe she’s a partner in that practice). I’ll see if he gets to do more.
I don’t think Fox has another Raising Hope on its hands.
I like her, haven’t seen the pilot. It is not unusual for there to be a lot of tweaking between the pilot and the first few episodes so I’ll give it a try.
“humorous but not funny” is a good way of describing this show.
BTW, Ellie Kemper who plays Erin the receptionist on The Office had a guest role on the most recent episode and it was nice to see her act not like her character from the Office for a change.
Overall, I’d say a better show than 2 broke girls but still not appointment TV by any stretch of the imagination.
Although I have not watched show, I do find interesting how relatively short of a time it took for there to be a prime time network show starring an Eastern Indian character compared to black or Hispanic title characters.
I don’t understand this. It took decades longer for their to be a show starring an Eastern Indian character since this is the first one. How long do you think that people from India have been in the United States?
Furthermore, it’s on the merits of her being “funny” with very little Indian-based humore and not a schtick like Margaret Cho’s show from a decade ago, Living Single, - or more recent, relevant, hilarious though tragically short-lived Outsourced.