Why Not Me? (11 page)

I unstuck myself and we went into Kevin’s office. The good news: Kevin was cheerful and open about how much he liked the script. His super-handsome face was glowing with handsomeness. But he wasn’t won over yet. He had some very specific notes he wanted me to address. The notes were about making sure that the character of Danny Castellano was strong and masculine. He didn’t want my character to outsmart him and push him around. I had my assignment.

One of my very worst qualities is how impatient I am, but it’s actually very helpful when I am rewriting. I skipped out of the Fox lot, threw my Keds back on, resisted the temptation to go over to the Simpsons building and take selfies with the Bart Simpson topiary, and raced to the car to take another shot of Cuervo for my drive home—this time a celebratory one.

For the next three days I worked nonstop. There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks, and I had it, big-time. If I breathed in deeply, I could smell my unwashed scent and it was intoxicating. It smelled like hard work. You know on
Game of Thrones
how Khal Drogo always looked powerful and dirty because he’d been marauding nonstop for weeks? That’s how I pictured myself. I was Khal Drogo on this pilot. My fingers were my Dothraki Khalasar. And Kevin Reilly was my Khaleesi, for I was going to make him/her mine/Drogo’s.

I turned in the script to Bela and the rest of studio. They signed off on it and sent it to Kevin. I waited.

Two days later, Kevin called me. He said he wanted to shoot it.

Kevin didn’t even use a sports metaphor, like “I’m putting your script into the game,” he just said it. But in truth, my Hail Mary pass had been caught in the end zone just as the last seconds ticked off the clock. I just looked up those terms online.

I was so excited, and I was really scared. I no longer worked at
The Office
. I was going to have a new office.
My
office.

THE NO-LONGER-UNTITLED MINDY PROJECT/THE TITLED MINDY PROJECT

Originally, in my pilot script, I had named my character Mira. But Kevin Reilly told me to change it to Mindy. This made me nervous. Ultimately, the note was the best advice (OK, order) that he ever gave me. By having the lead character share my name, it lent an authenticity to the show that people really responded to. Jerry Seinfeld kept his first name Jerry in
Seinfeld
, and it made you feel like you were his pal too, and that he wasn’t trying to add distance between the viewer and his point of view. Calling her Mindy also inadvertently helped to make me more famous. My real name was on TV listings and billboards and radio ads across the country! Now whenever I see a subway ad for
The Mindy Project
, I can’t believe it’s my
actual name
on there, and I get so excited, even if my face has been vandalized with a Hitler mustache. Because that’s how you truly know you’ve made it.

I had finally done it. I had created a show. Not for Must-See TV, home of
Cheers
and
Friends
. But for Fox, home of
Married … with Children
and
Joe Millionaire
. You never quite get everything you want the way you want it. But here I was, a showrunner and TV star, so who cared? Nothing bad would happen to me now. The end!

NOT SO FAST, BIG SHOT

Four years later, after three seasons, Fox canceled
The Mindy Project
. The day it was canceled, I was in Montana, on the first vacation I had taken in seven years. When I heard the news about the show, I was floating down the Blackfoot River. I was incredibly surprised. But I probably shouldn’t have been. A year earlier, handsome, supportive, sports-analogy-using Kevin Reilly had left Fox for TBS, and the new heads of Fox did not agree with him that I was a valuable “designated hitter.” You know when an old prewar building in Manhattan is bought by a developer and all the new tenants are cool yuppies, except there’s one old rent-control crone left over from the Depression? And the landlord really wants to evict her but because of tenant rights has to pretend like “No, we love Crelga; she’s so colorful and full of attitude. I love her Depression stories!,” but secretly they are thinking of ways to have her replaced by John Stamos? It was kind of like that. I was Crelga.

The day we were canceled, I received hundreds of texts and emails, and
The Mindy Project
trended on Twitter. I have never been prouder of the show. We also received calls from other outlets that were interested in buying it. One was from the streaming platform Hulu. I knew Hulu because, besides sounding like a whimsical Danish candy, many of our fans were already watching it there. My friends Jason Reitman and James Franco were already doing series for them. Hulu was attracting better talent than the networks were, and when I met the president, Craig Erwich, he loved the show and wanted it to help establish their brand. Most important, though, he was good-looking. A week later, the deal was announced that Hulu had picked up
The Mindy Project
for season 4, for twenty-six episodes. I’d gone from barely having time to transition from my panic of not having a job to the panic of more work than I’d ever had before. And that’s all show business is, really. Transitioning panics.

I think that’s the lesson of this story: you never know what is going to happen.

Other lessons:

•  No matter how good you have it, it’s cool to want more.

•  Self-pity gets results.

•  Sometimes you can get a second chance.

•  Sometimes you get a third chance.

•  Never take a vacation.

•  Austin Mahone has a bright future as a singer and youth-brand spokesperson.

•  It’s OK to drink tequila in the car if you just had a really good meeting.

•  If you believe in yourself and work hard, your dreams will come true.

•  Well … I guess the people who work hard whose dreams
don’t
come true don’t get to write books about it, so we never really find out what happens to them. So …

•  If you believe in yourself and work hard, you have a fighting shot at having your dreams come true.

¹
If this is too interesting-sounding to toss off in an essay about something else, please read my essay about it in my first book. I bet your older sister or maybe-secretly-gay best guy friend has it somewhere.

²
Men! Psst, men! Are you still reading? Don’t worry, we’re past the chick-lit-girl-nerd stuff. Coming up next: competition, success, money, sex!

³
Austin Mahone (born April 4, 1996) is an American pop singer-songwriter. He is currently signed to Young Money Entertainment and Cash Money Records. He has filmed commercials for McDonald’s and Hot Nuts, a Mexican snacking nut.

MINDY LAHIRI, MD, EVERYGIRL, MILD SOCIOPATH

E
VERYONE KNOWS THAT
all white people are racist. And the clearest evidence of that racism is when white people (as well as people of pretty much every other color) confuse
me
with the characters I write for myself to play. Racism: When will it end?

Between playing the selfish, boy-crazy narcissist Kelly Kapoor on
The Office
and the contrarian, delusionally confident Mindy Lahiri on
The Mindy Project
, I should probably give up on anyone thinking that I, Mindy Kaling, am normal or cool. But I still have hopes. So I thought I’d try to clear up some of the differences between the two Mindys. I did something similar with Kelly Kapoor in my last book, although I don’t think anyone believed me.

Things Mindy Lahiri Would Do That I Would Not

•  Dry her Spanx in an oven

•  Send Michael Fassbender her underwear

•  Own a gun and keep misplacing it

•  Save a life

•  Think Rick Santorum is hot

•  Tell people she is twenty-four

•  Have twelve handsome white boyfriends in one calendar year

•  Sue a Boston Market for giving too-small helpings of sides

•  Create a secret Twitter account just to follow the guys in One Direction and their fan accounts

•  Deliver twins while wearing enough makeup for a
Vogue
cover shoot

•  Flirt with a fireman while he was fighting a fire and be miffed she doesn’t have his undivided attention

•  Ask to board a plane early with parents and babies because she feels that she too “needs a little extra time to get settled”

•  Get banned for life from Pinkberry for sample fraud

Things Mindy Lahiri and I Would Both Do

•  Yell at teenagers for being too loud on the subway

•  Graze at the Whole Foods hot foods bar and get reprimanded, then claim racism

•  Go on dangerous juice cleanses

•  Dress like a children’s performer and think it’s high fashion

•  Say “Whoa” when we see a hot guy

•  Say “Whoa” when we see a hot pizza

•  Lie on the floor in despair a few times a year

•  Have a fake phone conversation to avoid talking to the Über guy

•  Explain to a person on a plane who doesn’t speak any English the difference between Instagram and Pinterest

•  Travel to the Super Bowl, but only for the parties the night before, and skip the game

•  See food poisoning as an opportunity to springboard into a new exercise regimen

•  Pretend not to have seen
Star Wars
to enrage
Star Wars
fans

ON BEING A MENTOR, BY GREG DANIELS