Never Have I Ever has a sweetness to it, but it also brings the heat. There’s some signature Kaling self-deprecation at play, but it isn’t as seething as it could sometimes be on The Mindy Project. Devi takes a lot of losses in the pilot, but the show also has a tremendous amount of empathy for her. While Devi has had a longtime crush on athletic cool boy Paxton Hall-Yoshida (incredible name for a high-school heartthrob), she sets the bar low, going after an obviously gay guy who isn’t out yet. Devi’s heritage and culture are definitely a significant part of who she is, but it’s all presented in a natural, organic way that makes it all the more authentic and resonant.Īt school, Devi’s best friends Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez) and Eleanor (Ramona Young) are social outcasts alongside her, but they’re not so quick to jump onboard with Devi’s plan to make all of them more popular, which involves an overhaul of their personalities and wardrobes and also the mission to secure boyfriends.
Never Have I Ever doesn’t bend over backward to explain Indian culture, Indian-Americanness, or Hinduism to white viewers, which is a welcome surprise. Devi resents Kamala who is, on the surface, the platonic ideal of an Indian woman in the eyes of Devi’s mother, but there are early hints that Kamala struggles to live up to the expectations of her family, particularly her hesitation about an arranged marriage. She lives with her mother (played by Poorna Jagannathan) and her cousin Kamala (Richa Shukla), a biologist who is so beautiful that random men on bikes crash just looking at her. It still affects the way she’s treated at school, even by her close friends, but Never Have I Ever doesn’t yet seem all that interested in exploring disability in a nuanced, meaningful, inclusive way, even though it ends up being a major part of Devi’s arc leading up to where she’s at emotionally at the start of the series.īut Devi is fleshed out and dynamic in other areas, and the world around her is, too. The pilot never fully reckons with that, though, because by the time sophomore year begins, Devi’s ability to use her legs suddenly returns, making her previous disability sort of just a blip in her past. Devi experienced bullying as a result of using a wheelchair and less obvious but still insidious comments from her classmates and teachers. Her father (played by Sendhil Ramamurtny in a brief but infectious performance) died suddenly of a heart attack during a school function, and in her grief, Devi became paralyzed from the waist down. Indeed, her freshman year wasn’t just bad - it was tragic. It’s the start of sophomore year, and Devi is praying for a better one than last. “It’ll make sense later, I promise,” McEnroe teases at the top of the episode, and Never Have I Ever delivers on that promise, weirdly pulling off this very specific stylistic choice.
#NEVER HAVE I EVER SEASON 2 EPISODE 1 FULL EPISODE SERIES#
On the subject of voice, perhaps the strangest choice of all for this series is to have it be narrated by tennis star John McEnroe. Devi, played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, is the teen protagonist of Mindy Kaling’s new Netflix series Never Have I Ever, a sweet and often surprising rom-com that establishes its voice right away. One of the most immediately endearing things about Devi Vishwakumar is that she gets angry.
0 kommentar(er)
