SALON

Wednesday, Dec 5, 2012 3:42 PM UTC

“The Mindy Project”: Mindy’s got a beef with midwives

"30 Rock" and "Parks and Rec" send up health trends from the perspective of a zany liberal. "Mindy's" just nasty

By

Topics: the mindy project, Mindy Kaling, midwives, TV, Television,

(Credit: Fox/Jordin Althaus)

What does Mindy Kaling have against midwives? Something! On last night’s episode of “The Mindy Project,” two smooth-talking, Zen-having male midwives (I don’t have the stats to back me up here, but I’d bet whatever you’ve got that men do not make up a significant percentage of midwives in this country) began poaching patients from Mindy Lahiri’s practice. Mindy’s male colleagues tried to retain their patients in a bro-ish and counterproductive way: by calling pregnant women attractive and offering them a discount. Only Mindy could stop the defections, and she did so by storming upstairs into the midwives’ gong-having, holistic-themed offices and scaring her patients into sticking with the doctors. “If you are a healthy 22-year-old, that baby is going to fly out of you no matter who delivers you,” Mindy explained. “But if you’re middle-aged, obese, have diabetes, then who’s going to help you?” Because there is apparently no middle ground between being 22 and being high-risk, the patients, abashed, filed back downstairs.

I’m not particularly interested in fact-checking this episode — though some midwife might want to do that. Midwives may not be doctors, but they actually do get trained! They’re not necessarily anti-vaccination! But I do want to raise some numbers, to make a larger point about “The Mindy Project’s” still under development tone. In 2009 midwives delivered 8.1 percent of American babies. Most of these deliveries took place in a hospital (less than 1 percent of American births take place at home). Midwives are not a big fixture in most pregnant Americans’ lives— unless you’re a certain kind of American.

Midwife-assisted birth has, in the words of the New York Times, become a “status symbol” among health-minded, affluent, urban woman who are likely educated enough not to be bossed around by their doctors and probably belong to their neighborhood CSA.  In other words, midwifery is a well-meaning, runty and undervalued profession to pick on, unless you’re in a certain demographic, where it has become as omnipresent as crazy baby names. That demographic contains Mindy and, presumably, a good portion of the show’s hoped for audience, which is why midwifery, narrow as it may be, is a good premise for “The Mindy Project.” Its writers and audience have feelings about and experience with midwifery as practiced in swanky, upscale New York City offices.

But that just makes it all the more remarkable how dismissive “The Mindy Project’s” send-up of midwifery was. “The Mindy Project” is not alone in skewering the affectations of liberal, affluent Americans whose do-gooder instincts get stuck on their own and their offspring’s perfect health — it’s a great, if not the great, comedic subject of our particular Zeitgeist — but “The Mindy Project” was nastier about it than other sitcoms are. (Kaling’s personal politics and tastes may make her more intolerant of this sort of BS to begin with.)

“30 Rock” eviscerates bougie trends all of the time, but from the everything-is-broken perspective of a zany, exhausted liberal. It might mock midwifery, but it would never champion doctors. (Could you do worse than Dr. Spaceman, anyway?)  “Parks and Rec’s” Chris Traeger is perhaps the ultimate goof on the self-betterment instinct, a man walking, talking and rushing toward perfection, though not necessarily happiness, at all times. Chris’ eating habits are regularly mocked by Ron Swanson, whose own all-meat-eating tendencies are teased by the show itself. But on “Parks” almost all mocking (except of Jerry) is done with love.

“Mindy,” on the other hand, could barely take this particular lifestyle choice seriously. I kept expecting a scene where one of the women was given excellent, if annoyingly new-agey care by one of the midwives (certainly, the male doctors at Mindy’s practice weren’t giving any). It didn’t happen. The midwives were little more than cutie quacks, and all it took to get the dummies — and also audience surrogates! — who abandoned Mindy’s practice to come back was a not that convincing lecture. Mindy Lahiri is supposed to be smug, but in this instance “The Mindy Project” felt smug itself — so dismissive of anyone who would throw over Western medicine during childbirth, it didn’t even mount a scathing counterattack.

When “The Mindy Project” started, Kaling said she wanted it to be like a female “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” As “Mindy” has gone on, it’s gotten sharper and funnier, but it’s still having hard time seeing its heroine quite as caustically as it does everyone else around her. Is Mindy a jerk or is she right? Last night, she needed to be a little more of the former if she wanted to be the latter.

Willa Paskin

Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. More Willa Paskin.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 12 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations