Never Have I Ever

There is just so much that I love about Never Have I Ever. I love that the series opens with Devi, praying before her first day back at school, with her pre-blessed geometry textbook right there at the altar. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had my entire school syllabus moved into our prayer room at home before a big exam. Every little helps, right?)

I love when Mohan and Nalini are on his Vespa, speeding down the Southern California coast, and he tells her not to be afraid because his moped has been sanctified by a priest. (This is my parents to a tittle!)

I love that the series didn’t just give us yet another Diwali episode, but dug deep and went with Vinayakar Chaturthi (or Ganesh Pooja) instead. I love how Devi’s mother calls her கண்ணா (“kanna”). I love all those times she breaks out into Tamil and how none of it is subtitled. I love that no one wears their shoes when inside the house.

I love John McEnroe. (What John McEnroe has to do with all of this will become clear when you watch the series.)

I love that we get a series featuring an “ethnic” teenage girl who is both a horny nerd and a self-involved asshole. Step aside Rajinikanth, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is my new favourite Indian.

But most of all, I love how unapologetically Indian it is. There is no glossary here. There are no footnotes. None of its words are italicised. Like Kim’s Convenience, like Gentefied, it isn’t something that’s dumbed down or explained in any way. It just is. It is also something that only Mindy Kaling could have pulled off. The most successful Indian-American in the industry today, this series is a consequence of all her experience and influence.

So it’s good. And it hits all the right notes. My only problem with it is that it sometimes hits all the same notes.

But before I get into that, a quick, but necessary parenthetical.

(Can’t Hardly Wait is the best high-school-coming-of-age movie ever made. Fight me! Taking the ideas that sprang from American Graffiti and Say Anything, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Porky’s, the movie fine-tuned those archetypes – of the sardonic best friend, the “nice guy” looking for love, the sexpot, the high school jock – and threw them together in a series of romantic showdowns, deep philosophical conversations, and (literal) bathroom jokes. It set every moment to a catchy pop song. It took away the shower scene and made it just risqué enough for a PG-13 rating. It provided the template for everything that would come after.)

Never Have I Ever tells the story of Devi, a high schooler in California, an American Born Confused Desi, who is torn between her two worlds. You know what it’s like. Going to temple before getting blind drunk at a party. She struggles with her Indian-ness, but doesn’t want to be some white American cliché either. Add to that a helping of personal trauma, her uncontrollable temper, a classroom nemesis, a hot boy with a double-barrelled name to lust after, and a couple of plucky BFFs, and what you have is the same, somewhat predictable, high school setup that we’ve seen in everything from Superbad to Booksmart, from 10 Things I Hate About You to Mean Girls.

The core conflict in Never Have I Ever doesn’t really stray very much from those well-worn tropes and ideas. The high school drama here plays out like a genre checklist. As it does in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. As it does in I Am Not Okay With This. But unlike those two, this doesn’t really subvert your expectations in any way.

But maybe the American high school experience is just the American high school experience. Only here it’s just a little more true to life by virtue of being a little more diverse, and a little more representative.

Maybe it should be enough having a brown face at the centre of all this hijinks as opposed to the many, many white faces we’ve already seen. Maybe all of this did happen to Mindy Kaling and she too should be allowed the same self-indulgence as Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen. (She should.) But I found it telling that I was more interested in the stories of the grown-ups than I was the kids. I wanted to know more about Devi’s parents, Mohan and Nalini. I wanted to know what made her cousin, Kamala, tick. Which was surprising given just how good Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Ramona Young, Lee Rodriguez, Darren Barnet, and Jaren Lewison are.

Never Have I Ever is laugh out loud funny, with plenty of moments that manage to subtly capture the inner lives of the outsider. (Heck, even the inner life of the insider is captured perfectly in a bottle episode centred around Devi’s nemesis Ben.) Which is why it’s unfortunate every time the series falls back on the same old same old. When all it does is change the names and the faces. It’s those moments that hold it back from greatness.

But while it may not be perfect, Never Have I Ever is nevertheless important. It is diverse. It is tonally resonant. But even more than that, it is because the series also manages to speak to those outside the American immigrant experience. To all of us who grew up on a steady diet of American popular culture, who have only ever experienced that kind of angst and yearning and heartbreak by watching it on television, and wishing that we too came of age in such an exciting manner.

Never Have I Ever is important to us, not because of something as mind-numbingly basic as being able to see someone who looks like us on screen, but because it allows us to see versions of ourselves on screen. Indian or Chinese. Tech geek or drama queen. Obnoxious. Self-involved. Straight. Gay. It reminds us that’s it’s possible to be one of those things or all of those things. And that who we are isn’t defined by where we come from or what we look like.

Never Have I Ever
Netflix, Season 1, 10 episodes
Showrunners: Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher
Directors: Tristram Shapeero, Kabir Akhtar, Linda Mendoza, and Anu Valia
Writers: Mindy Kaling, Lang Fisher, Chris Schleicher, Justin Noble, and Akshara Sekar
Cast: Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Darren Barnet, Poorna Jagannathan, Jaren Lewison, Lee Rodriguez, Richa Moorjani, Benjamin Norris, Adam Shapiro, Christina Kartchner, Ramona Young, Sendhil Ramamurthy, and John McEnroe

Never Have I Ever is now streaming on Netflix.