 |
| Mindy Kaling and company return for a pivotal sophomore year of "The Mindy Project" |
Sitcoms are notoriously difficult to get right from the
start. Even the best comedies usually
take 15-20 episodes to really find their footing and their voices and start
cranking out the funny. Parks and Recreation, The Office, 30 Rock, Louie, How I Met Your
Mother, New Girl, and Community
are all examples of recent comedies that either peaked in their sophomore years
or didn’t hit their comedic stride until about 20 episodes in. So when The
Mindy Project struggled creatively in its first season, it wasn’t exactly a
surprise, nor it was it a sign of a bad show.
Mindy was, after all, at times
very funny.
There is no doubting the talent behind The Mindy Project. The Office veteran Mindy Kaling, apart
from starring in the show, is the executive producer and head writer, penning
one-third of the first season scripts.
She was joined by a number of veteran staff writers including, perhaps
most notably, Chris McKenna, fresh off his Emmy nomination for writing what may
have been Community’s finest
half-hour “Remedial Chaos Theory.” Charles
McDougall, also a veteran of The Office
and the man behind the pilots of both Desperate
Housewives and The Good Wife,
directed the pilot and a half dozen other episodes. Emmy winner Michael Spiller and five-time
nominee Beth McCarthy-Miller were behind the camera for another eight episodes.
The cast is fantastic as well, though
it didn’t come without issues. Stephen
Tobolowski left after the second episode with Anna Camp and Amanda Setton
following late in the season. That isn’t
to say that they weren’t doing good work, they just didn’t have enough to
do. It’s incredibly difficult for a
22-minute show (after commercials) to properly service a cast of eight. Just look at how The Office handled things.
For the first few seasons, the featured characters were almost always
Michael, Jim, Pam, and Dwight. It was
only once they had been fully established that the rest of the cast (who had been
there all along) started to get fleshed out.
The Mindy Project, on the
other hand, tried to service every character from the start. There were just too many and the show
definitely improved when it culled things down to the core four (Mindy, Danny,
Morgan, and Jeremy) with a handful of regulars and recurring characters filling
things out.
While everybody involved with the first season of the show
was great, it never quite came together.
Mindy struggled to find its
focus, jumping back and forth between Mindy’s work life, Mindy’s home life, and
the antics of the supporting characters.
It also seemed to a lack a sense of place. It was ostensibly set in an OB/GYN practice
in New York City, but so much time was spent out of the office and what other
time wasn’t spent in an apartment didn’t really feel like it was uniquely New
York. One of the things all of those
shows I mentioned in the first paragraph had developed by the end of their
freshman years, with the exception of Louie,
was a single location (or occasionally two) to which our characters could
comfortably return. Parks & Rec, 30 Rock and The
Office had their offices. HIMYM had MacLaren’s Pub and Ted and
Marshall’s apartment. New Girl had the apartment. Community
had the study room. The doctors’ office
seems like it would be that place for Mindy
but, for some reason, the characters never really feel comfortable there. Perhaps it’s because so much of what goes on
in that office is unrelated to the actual practice. I’m not sure.
But Mindy needs to find a
setting to which it can come back time and again and have its characters feel
comfortable and at home.
The second season premiere, “All My Problems Solved
Forever…” doesn’t fix all of Mindy’s
problems, but it gives me hope that the writers and actors have finally gotten
enough of an idea of who these characters are and what they can do that the
show will have a solid, if not great, second season.
The episode takes about two minutes to get
Mindy back to New York from Haiti and it’s really for the better. Not that the Haiti scenes were bad,
just…predictable. And Mindy and her
fiancé (spoiler) Casey aren’t particularly interesting together without a
supporting cast to cause chaos. It’s not
really a spoiler, though, to say that Mindy and Casey get engaged since it happens while they're still in Haiti. The story that
follows is really great and, above all, feels true to the characters. I won’t get in to how everything shakes out,
but everything that happens feels like it’s exactly what should happen, and fits
perfectly with the characters’ personalities.
Any scenes not involving Mindy are still a bit problematic,
most notably the relationship between Danny and his ex-wife. Their relationship has progressed to living
together though not, apparently, doing (ahem) other things. Thankfully, the doctor they’ve brought in to
replace Mindy is James Franco, Sex Therapist.
It’s tough to distinguish between the moments when Franco is really
trying to be an actor and when he’s just being James Franco, but he’s actually
pretty good here, landing most of the episode’s best lines and establishing a
bit of professional competition for Mindy moving forward.
I can only guess as to how long he’s going to be on Mindy, but his character is well-established enough and interesting
enough that I’m happy to have him around for as long as it stays that way.
The Mindy Project
isn’t a great show. At this point, I’d
say it’s just a good show. But it makes
me laugh pretty consistently and it feels like everybody involved has really
figured the characters out and has the ability to put on a great season of television. If you haven’t watched so far, I’d say now is
as good a time as any to pick it up and I would certainly recommend you watch,
not necessarily because of the past, but because of the potential future.
So thoughts?
Comments? Just want to tell me my
blog sucks? Let me know in the comments
or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.
No comments:
Post a Comment