Mindy Kaling: Our sitcom dream girl
A preview for the "Office" star's new sitcom succeeds where Whitney and Chelsea fell flat
Mindy Kaling (Credit: AP/Matt Sayles) After an exhausting year of would-be TV manic dream girls trying to charm, seduce and pratfall their way into our hearts, this fall we get the woman we’ve wanted all along. Let the finger crossing for “The Mindy Kaling Project” commence!
On the surface, a sitcom about a young, kooky OB/GYN with a spotty dating history and a penchant for getting falling-down drunk doesn’t exactly scream “groundbreaking.” But it’s the presence of the woman who’s given us the fearlessly self-obsessed Kelly Kapoor on “The Office” all these years, who wrote a book called “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?” and who launched her career channeling Ben Affleck in a play, that gives the show the distinct possibility of actually not sucking.
Why is Kaling great? Why does her formulaic show look considerably more promising than the already-canceled-in-my-mind “Guys With Kids”? For starters, she’s already been at it for seven years. TV is her zone. She doesn’t harbor the affected air of a stand-up comic or a slumming movie star, trying to cram herself into 22 fake-fun minutes. Instead, like “SNL” veterans Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, she’s got a natural flair and rhythm for the medium.
She’s also appealing because in a world full of muti-hyphenate female talents, not all of them juggle being writers and performers with her finesse. Kaling isn’t some ukulele-playing girl-woman trapped in a fluffy pink hell of her own making. Her characters may be immature, for sure, but they don’t seem perennially stuck in a wide-eyed, love me love me love me shtick. Nor is Kaling herself, despite the obvious comparisons “The Mindy Kaling Project” invites to the drunky slutty chick vehicles of Chelsea or Whitney. The confrontational, aggressive energy that made Handler and Cummings successful in stand-up and talk shows never gelled in the collaborative world of scripted comedy. Their attempts at humor seemed flat and obvious, the mere barking of supposedly shocking one-liners. Kaling, on the other hand, knows how and when to let a costar be ridiculous, the better to make the whole scene fiercer and funnier. And as for the (totally justified) accusations of casual cultural insensitivity on “Two Broke Girls” and the lack of diversity on “Girls,” well, one look at Kaling on a bike screaming “Racist!” at a passing motorist in the preview offers hope of a considerably broader perspective.
What makes Kaling so promising, however, isn’t all that she is not. It’s that she’s so charmingly flawed, so enthusiastically believable even when she’s doing cliché bits like gluing her hands together in a taxicab prayer for a good date. (Has anyone, in the history of the world, ever done this?) She may not be entirely convincing as the person you’d want wielding a speculum in your direction, but as situation comedy’s most likable mess, she’s just what the doctor ordered.
Time magazine’s breast-feeding cover star: Is he doomed?
A provocative magazine cover doesn't mean the breast-feeding preschooler is in for a lifetime of "Got milk" jokes
The cover of Time magazine In the single, whipped-up day since Time magazine unleashed that cover story about crazed MILFs “driven” to “extremes” by attachment parenting, there’s been plenty of debate over its provocative image of blogger Jamie Lynne Grumet breast-feeding her almost 4-year-old son. And, as so often happens when adults see an image that unnerves them, that anxiety is projected onto kids. In this case, one kid in particular. Grumet’s.
Continue Reading CloseWhy Time’s cover shocks
Hint: it's not the breast-feeding -- it's the contempt
The cover of Time magazine It’s going to be a long Mom War, people.
In case you thought, nay, hoped, that the barrel-bottom had been fully scraped last week when the New York Times asked, in a query straight out of the Onion, “Has women’s obsession with being the perfect mother destroyed feminism?,” now Time magazine has upped the ante with a cover story brazenly challenging “Are You Mom Enough?”
It’s accompanied, by the way, by a picture of a hot blonde and her 3-year-old son standing on a chair to suckle her breast. Yo, take THAT, Room for Debate page! I guess Time felt it really had to bring it after uber-troll Katie Roiphe’s piece last month on why feminists just want a good spanking.
Continue Reading CloseObama goes viral, wins Twitter
The president's endorsement of gay marriage becomes a cleverly -- and intensely -- choreographed meme
When Barack Obama blew America’s mind by declaring his support for same-sex marriage Wednesday, he explained that his views on the subject had long been “evolving.” But while evolution is a process that can take millennia, social media moves with considerably more swiftness. However long it took the White House (nudged though it was by Joe Biden’s Sunday blurt that he was “absolutely comfortable” with marriage equality) to get to that place, it took no time at all for Obama’s sentiments to become a meme.
Continue Reading Close“Suddenly, I’m Tipper Gore”
The conservative 100 Million Moms misfire again. Is it possible to protect kids without being a censor or prude?
(Credit: iStockphoto/paule858) Twenty-five years after Tipper Gore and Susan Baker went on a legendary crusade against rock ‘n’ roll, mothers are still battling the pernicious influence of popular culture on our offspring. Back then, it was dirty Prince lyrics. Now, it’s the JC Penney catalog. Oh, how the so-called culture wars have changed.
Last week, the conservative Christian group One Million Moms, already enraged that the retailer ignored the call to fire beloved, “open homosexual spokesperson” Ellen DeGeneres as its spokesperson, took on another quest. This time, vowing “the loss in sales from traditional families,” they’re taking aim at an image of a smiling same-sex married couple with their daughter in one of the retailer’s ads. This, to them, somehow represents “the immorality, violence, vulgarity and profanity the entertainment media is throwing at your children.” There they go again, giving moms a bad name.
Continue Reading CloseA Catholic school’s anti-gay snub
When a student wins the Matthew Shepard Scholarship, the bishop steps in -- and everybody loses
Keaton Fuller Remember last month, when the Vatican issued a smackdown to American nuns for their “radical feminist themes,” like not being vocal enough about opposing same-sex marriage? Now, just to really hammer home how divisive the issue has become, a bishop in Davenport, Iowa, has vetoed Catholic school officials and said he would not permit the Eychaner Foundation to present its Matthew Shepard Scholarship to a gay senior at his high school graduation.
Continue Reading ClosePage 1 of 205 in Mary Elizabeth Williams