If you haven’t seen the debut episode of BUST covergirl Mindy Kaling’s new show, The Mindy Project, you probably need to drop everything you’re doing right now and get in the loop. As Mindy’s same-name character tells a five-year-old in the first episode: “You’re boring. Contribute something!” And contribute we have – everyone’s been recapping, buzzing, and writing critically about the show for the past week after FOX streamed the show early. We’ll be recapping all the episodes as they happen, too, but the season premiere has been beaten and praised to death this week. So, instead of telling you what you already know about the first episode, let’s talk about what we’re dying to know about the rest of the season.
For those of you who need a memory refresher, here’s a brief synopsis of the first episode. Mindy is a successful, Princeton-graduated doctor in a hospital specializing in obstetrics and pediatrics. In spite of this, her sheer love for romantic comedies led her to fall in love pretty quickly with Bill Hader’s character, a dentist who got stuck in an elevator with Mindy and then moved in with her two months later. According to Mindy, she was “basically Sandra Bullock.” Then the dentist ran away with a Serbian bagel girl, leaving Mindy to get drunk at their wedding and get arrested for public intoxication after riding a tiny bicycle into a stranger’s pool. Oh, and Chris Messina plays the hot but rude Dr. Danny Castellano, who expresses significant irritability at the googly eyes between Mindy and the hot British doctor, Jeremy.
In a few words: Dr. Mindy is organized chaos in sequins and scrubs. Got it?
Here are my main concerns for the future of The Mindy Project, in no particular order of importance:
1. How many romantic-comedy references are we talkin’ here, Mindy? In the first episode, there were at least four or more. My favorite: “Did you think Tom was just going to ditch the wedding and run off with you like you’re Katherine Heigl?” I’m concerned this coudl either be really detrimental to my life, as I may end up revisiting all the rom-coms dropped. Mostly, though, I’m looking forward to the amazing meta-romcom moments to come.
2. Let’s talk about sex. Not the sex between the characters, because I’m not as concerned about that as I am simply stoked to see how Mindy and British Jeremy pan out. I’m talking about the baby delivering, contraception talking, plastic model of a vagina, hospital sex talk. I’m concerned with exactly how hilarious the childbirth jokes are going to get. While Grey’s Anatomy was drama-filled and Scrubs was full of hilarious gags, I think that The Mindy Project could turn out to be a winning combination of the two. Forget dick jokes, you guys. The new one-liners? In the tradition of Michael Scott, perhaps: that’s what she said…during childbirth.
3. Will Ed Helms and Mindy hook up?! Ed played Mindy’s first date that we see on the show, and she checks off different requirements on her list to make sure he meets all of them. On a note-pad. In front of him, sans discretion. Plus, she ends up hooking with British Jeremy afterwards. I know it’s kind of a lame concern, but I really, really don’t know if I can handle Ed and Mindy making out on screen. I’ll just imagine Andy and Kelly, and The Office will be forever changed. But after this amazing pilot episode, maybe seeing Kelly as Dr. Mindy’s silly cousin is inevitable. And awesome.
