Why Not Me? (10 page)

I told my manager, Howard Klein, privately how I felt, and so, at the end of season 7, when my original contract with Universal expired, they hired me to stay on as a writer and actress with
The Office
, and included a development deal for a pilot. A development deal is pretty rad. I got an assistant, whose job it was to figure out how iCloud worked and pretend to be my friend sometimes but let me yell at her other times. Basically I got a chunk of money to keep working on
The Office
but also to create a brand-new show, which I would write on Sunday afternoons sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor with no pants on.

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. I would emerge from the show’s legacy as a modern version of Larry David and Mary Tyler Moore, retiring to a tasteful megacompound on Martha’s Vineyard, where I would write plays and drink wine with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen at least several nights a week.

The one thing I was unprepared for was the slightest setback. What could go wrong?

“THE UNTITLED MINDY KALING PROJECT”

Let’s go over my plan: I was going to write a show starring myself and it was going to be a smash hit. I would take everything good I learned at
The Office
and lose everything I didn’t like about
The Office
. Mindy Kaling + Office good – Office bad = Best show ever made = Me someday receiving a Kennedy Center Honor from President Elizabeth Warren.

But first I had to assemble all of the ingredients I knew a great show had to have.

Ingredient #1: A Big Funny Lead

I knew I wanted my character in the new show to be a big comedy character. There are plenty of shows on TV where the lead female exists solely to be the calm, responsible voice of reason. She is often the one keeping the cast of kooky side characters at bay, saying stuff like “Guys, are you sure this is a good idea?” or “You guys go on the road trip to recover the sex tape; I’ll stay here on the B-story about getting locked in the pantry.”

My favorite shows have a flawed and ridiculous lead who is steering the comedy of the show, making big mistakes and then struggling to fix them. Basil Fawlty from
Fawlty Towers
was my favorite example, as was Edina Monsoon from
Absolutely Fabulous
, and Michael Scott
,
of course. This was a must.

Ingredient #2: A Compelling Setting

I wanted the audience to enjoy my character’s bad behavior but also feel like she had some redeeming quality, which is the sneaky reason I chose to make Mindy Lahiri a doctor. I felt like if she did terrible things, but hey, she had this noble job where she was delivering babies and saving lives, people would respect her. This trick always works, by the way. That’s why every doctor on TV is a drug addict, a sociopath, or just plain mega-rude. Doctors can do anything they want!

When I was first setting my new show in the world of doctors, I wanted the medical side of it to be front and center. It was my mother, an OB/GYN herself, who dissuaded me from that.

ME:
Mom, let’s talk about the practical details of your job, for research.

MOM:
No, that is boring. If people want to see medical stuff they should watch
ER
.

ME:
Mom, that show hasn’t been on for years. Why shouldn’t I put medical stuff in the show?

MOM:
Because it’s sad and even when it’s happy, it can be gruesome.

MINDY:
But shouldn’t the show be gritty and realistic?

MOM:
Here’s realistic: when a baby is born, it’s covered in blood and strange fluids. Occasionally it has a cord around its neck and it’s blue and it’s wailing because its little body is cold. The only people who think it’s beautiful are its parents, and the doctor is just happy it’s alive. And none of that is funny.

My mother had a great argument. Plus, I didn’t want to hold a prop baby covered in birth slime. If there were two things my mom knew, it was comedy and obstetrics. And that was that.

Mom and I had always shared a love of romantic comedies and the version of Manhattan that Nora Ephron and Woody Allen had created for us in
You’ve Got Mail
and
Annie Hall
. She wanted me to play a character in that world. She also wanted to see me in decent clothes for once. While she loved the comedy on
The Office
, she also commented pretty regularly on how unglamorous it was. “Mom, the show isn’t supposed to be glamorous; it’s supposed to be real,” I explained. “Like Greg always says: ‘what’s beautiful is what’s real.’ ”

“What’s beautiful can also be what’s beautiful, though,” she replied. “I think there has been some precedent of that in Hollywood.” Not a bad point.

Mom continued, “I live real life every day. Why do I need to see it when I come home?” How could I argue with that?

Ingredient #3: Literary Pretensions

The Mindy Project
is most inspired by Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
. Besides being in a structurally perfect novel, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are probably my favorite couple in any book.
²
Danny Castellano is most based on Mr. Darcy (and a generous helping of Sonny Corleone from
The Godfather
). As for Mindy? Um, Mindy is much less like Elizabeth Bennet than she is a combination of Carrie Bradshaw and Eric Cartman.

Many people think romantic comedies are cheesy and boring, but that’s only because most romantic comedies that come out now are less funny than, say, a card your grandmother might send you for your birthday. People also complain that romantic comedies are formulaic and the ending is always the same. So I
wasn’t
going to do that.

Here’s what my show would be like (the then-called
The Untitled Mindy Kaling Project
). Boy meets Girl. Boy hates Girl. Girl is not that crazy about Boy either. Eventually Girl wears Boy down with friendliness. Boy and Girl become confidants. Boy grows to love girl but can’t express it. Boy and Girl get very close to marrying other boys and girls. Boy realizes he was being kind of a dick. Girl realizes she was being judgmental and superficial. Boy and Girl have sex. Boy and Girl accidentally get pregnant. Boy and Girl love each other as best they can and try to live happily ever after.

Let’s see if that works!

QUICK AND PAINFUL REJECTION: SEE YA, NBC

I submitted
The Untitled Mindy Kaling Project
to NBC Studios on a Thursday before a weekend I had planned in Palm Springs for my best friend Jocelyn’s bachelorette party. I had heard there was some excitement about my script at the studio and assumed I would hear good news by the end of the workday on Friday. But as Saturday of that weekend rolled by, I still hadn’t heard anything. Tipsy on margaritas and sleepy on poolside nachos, this was the first uneasy moment in which I considered the possibility that this pilot might not be a go. That night we went to a gay dance club, and while we were all dancing to Rihanna’s “Rude Boy,” I was starting to get worried.

It occurred to me that I barely knew the president of the studio at all, and this would be his decision entirely.

For the eight years that I had been there, NBC had been like a dysfunctional African country where the president changed every eleven months or so. Actually, NBC made most African countries look pretty stable by comparison. (Except Botswana. I hear good things about Botswana. That’s where
The Ladies #1 Detective Agency
is.)

Over the entire run of
The Office
, there were seven different people who had run the studio and network. Bob Greenblatt was the newest chief. I had met him briefly at a party once; he was tall and elegant and red-haired. We were friendly, but we were not friends.

And now, trapped in Palm Springs, I thought: Oh fuck. Why am I only
friendly
with Bob Greenblatt? Why did I not force him to become my friend?!

By the end of Monday, I still had heard nothing. While shooting scenes for
The Office
, I heard from our writing staff about other pilots getting picked up to be filmed. For the first time in seven years in the TV business, I was completely terrified about my career.

Between lighting setups onstage, I called Howard, and my agent, Matt Rice, again. They were gentle, but the news was bad. NBC had passed on my pilot. They didn’t even like it—or me—enough to shoot it with no intention of ever picking it up! Where was my pity pilot? I told them I totally understood their decision (I didn’t) and wasn’t surprised (I was surprised), and hung up.

Then I sat in my trailer and wept.

When you are entitled, you are the most insufferable person ever. If you are entitled and hardworking, which I am, you are still pretty insufferable, but at least you somewhat earned your entitled behavior. 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. I had thought it went without saying that I would one day have a show on NBC. It felt like destiny. It’s crazily presumptuous, but I always imagined a world where my show was on the same network as my favorite Must-See TV shows. And now it wasn’t going to happen.

It’s weird when you feel your dream slipping away from you. Especially when you have no other dreams. I was surprised that my overwhelming feeling was not sadness; it was terror. What on earth am I going to do now? I thought.
The Office
isn’t going to last forever. Would it end, and would I go work on a lesser comedy, sitting bitterly in the corner of the rewrite room of
My
Mismatched Moms
, eating a California Pizza Kitchen Thai Crunch Salad with peanut dressing on the side, telling people how great
my
show would have been? Or would I have to take a job as the obligatory ethnic host of
House Hunters International
, my voiceover gamely trying to maintain the tension of “Which house will the couple pick?” when everyone knows it’s the one the wife wants near the beach that’s perfect for entertaining?

I had reached the level of self-obsessed insanity at which point no reasonable person would ever feel sorry for me. But sometimes, in life, or at least in driver’s ed, the best advice is to “steer into the curve.” It was from this terror that I got an idea. I remembered the man who had been the president of NBC when
The Office
first started. The man who greenlit
The Office
when no one else thought it could succeed and, later,
30 Rock
. That man was Kevin Reilly.

KEVIN REILLY, THE ONLY JOCK WHO HAS EVER LIKED ME

Kevin Reilly likes to speak in sports analogies. It’s one of the most unsettling things about him because I am a nerd who doesn’t understand anything sports-related at all, except Serena Williams’s tennis outfits, which are fierce as hell. Kevin’s always saying things like “You’ve got a real deep bench, now, kid.” Or “You gotta keep your eye on the ball, and you’re going to push it over the goal line.” And I have no idea what he is talking about, but I nod enthusiastically and say, “Sure, of course, sports,” and hope he doesn’t ask any follow-up questions.

Kevin Reilly was always somewhat of a celebrity to me because, as I said, he had greenlit my favorite shows
.
His championing of
The Office
was particularly noteworthy because, at that time, critics and audiences alike weren’t crazy about it. He just trusted Greg and Steve and knew it was worth standing by.

Kevin is also very, very handsome. Ridiculously handsome. He looks like the guy they’d cast to play “Network Executive” on a terrible but fun-to-watch TV show. More important, I really liked what Kevin liked. Network executives usually have bad taste. 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. I have so often been on the receiving end of whatever powerful network executive’s children are watching that week. That is when I get calls telling me I should write an arc on my show for the singer Austin Mahone.
³

Howard sent the pilot script to Kevin and he and his team read it immediately. I got a call that he would like to see me the following day.

Call me superficial, or call me a genius (or call me both—Why can’t both be true?), but before the meeting, I went to the MAC store to get my makeup done, then to the Drybar on Sunset and got a blowout. I wanted Kevin and his team at Fox to see me as a potential star of a network TV show. They didn’t need to see my large pores or my forty sad strands of witch hair. They wanted big, bouncy, shiny,
Two Broke Girls
hair!

I drove to the Fox lot across town, parked, drank two shots from a bottle of Jose Cuervo that I keep on the floor of my passenger seat, arranged my breasts so it looked like I had filled in a solid B-cup, dissolved enough Listerine breath strips on my tongue so the inside of my mouth was burning, and raced across the lot, hoping not to run into Rupert Murdoch in my Keds (I wear Keds to every meeting and then go the restroom and change into my “slutty career woman” stilettos before I actually see anyone important).

I was joined at the meeting by Bela Bajaria, the head of Universal Television Studios. I was very lucky that Bela was so supportive and determined to sell the show somewhere other than NBC. But she was also my boss, and her presence made me even more nervous. “You’ll be great. You know what you’re doing,” Bela said warmly to me, a perfect stranger, while we waited to see Kevin. I nodded, grateful, while privately dying inside. How does she know I’ll be great? I’ve never pitched a show before! I get nervous when I tell anecdotes! Sometimes I accidentally blurt out the ending right in the middle! Also, I’m sweating. Do great people sweat so much their thighs stick to the leather sofas they’re sitting on?