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It’s a good day to be Mindy Kaling: Not only does her second book “Why Not Me?” hit shelves, but her canceled-and-saved “The Mindy Project” makes its much-awaited debut on Hulu.
Kaling’s profile has skyrocketed in the last few years thanks to her self-titled sitcom, of which she’s the creator, executive producer and star. She’s also known for being refreshingly honest about how Hollywood situations that look fantastic are sometimes actually awful. One of the best chapters in her first book “Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)” was about what really happened when she did a People magazine’s “most beautiful” photo shoot: She wound up crying in the bathroom because the staff only brought sample sizes of gorgeous gowns, and the one thing that would fit her was a hideous navy sack.
In “Why Not Me?” she tells similar stories about the so-called glamorous road to making your own TV show. Kaling spends a great deal of time reiterating that she appreciates her level of showbiz success, which many people would kill for, but that still doesn’t mean things are perfect all of time. Here are the three toughest lessons she learned:
1) The stars will line up, but that doesn’t mean everything will actually work out.
Kaling started to feel a little restless on NBC’s “The Office” after she spent seven years as a writer and supporting character. So her agent helped get her a development deal with the network, where she would get paid to still be on the show but also write a pilot.
“My natural assumption was that NBC would put my show on the air as part of a revitalized Must-See TV and make two hundred classic episodes — no lazy clip shows — finishing with a ninety-minute finale that everyone agreed was a sweet and satisfying send-off,” Kaling writes. “I would emerge from the show’s legacy as a modern version of Larry David and Mary Tyler Moore.”
Only one problem: Despite good buzz at the studio, NBC passed on making the pilot. Kaling was devastated.
“For all my other theoretical faults, no one can deny my powerful and driven work ethic, handed down to me from my immigrant parents and my suburban Boston peer group of kids who thought Cornell was a safety school,” she writes. “I had thought it went without saying that I would one day have a show on NBC. It felt like destiny…and now it wasn’t going to happen.” She added, “it’s weird when you feel your dream slipping away from you. Especially when you have no other dreams.”
2) Network executives can be scarily out of touch.
Eventually, of course, the show was picked up by Fox, thanks to Kaling’s former boss Kevin Reilly, who had changed networks to run Fox’s entertainment division and always had been a big fan of her work. Kaling writes about how she and Reilly have similar tastes in TV (he was also an early supporter of ratings-starved-but-beloved “The Office” and “30 Rock”), which is surprising given that he’s a television executive.
“Network executives usually have bad taste,” she said. “It’s either just a reflection of what market research tells them that normal people are into, or whatever their adolescent children are obsessed with.” Case in point: She’ll get phone calls from execs urging her to write an arc for singer Austin Mahone, whatever that is.
3) You can be put in an awkward situation on live TV, and you’ll have to just deal with it.
Around the time “The Mindy Project” was getting some serious critical acclaim, Kaling was tapped to announce the 2014 Emmy nominations. She secretly thought this meant she might have a pretty good shot at a lead actress in a comedy Emmy…until the president of the TV Academy approached her a few minutes before she went on air. “You know, you’re in such a tough category,” he said.
The disappointment hit hard, and Kaling said she didn’t even realize until that moment how much she wanted to be nominated. “Did I think I deserved that nomination? I don’t know, yeah! Maybe it sounds egotistical, but if you’re a person who creates your own show and stars in it, shouldn’t you believe you deserve recognition for it?” she wrote.
Then Kaling realized that she would have to go on stage in a few minutes and announce those jerks that did get nominations. She fumed about it for a while before realizing that she needed to pull it together, since people would be watching closely for her reaction. So she stood next to co-presenter Carson Daly and focused on remembering when she was a scared 22-year-old who never thought she would make it in Hollywood, and that her 22-year-old self would have been pretty thrilled that she even got a chance to stand on stage. “It had an oddly calming effect,” she wrote, noting she wound up looking “positively serene on camera.”
“The greatest crime is that I wasn’t nominated for that acting performance,” she wrote.
– The Washington Post
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