Why Not Me? (9 page)

Still, Greta was all about forgiveness and getting over stuff. I had messed up, but she would look past it. She hugged me before I got out of the car and said she would call. I breathed a sigh of relief.

GONE BABY GONE

At the end of July, work started up again at
The Office
. I was back on the schedule of six-a.m. call times and staying in the writers’ room until nine p.m. We still grabbed dinner or got exhaustion shots sometimes, but I couldn’t go with Greta to screenings and baby showers anymore. In the beginning, Greta was fine with my busyness. We kept in close touch, texting at least twenty times a day. But then, as the weeks went by, I heard from Greta less and less. She told me she was working more, though for the life of me I still could not pinpoint exactly what her job was. One weekend in September, I was miffed that she couldn’t get iced green teas with me. I texted: “I MISS you!” and “Why are we not getting frozen yogurt together right now?!” using all the emoticons Greta herself had taught me. But more and more, my texts went unanswered. Once I read down our text chain and saw she had written the exact phrase “Hey QT. Love you miss you xoxo” three times, like it had been copied and pasted.

In mid-October, on Facebook, I saw photos of Greta after booty ballet class with a gorgeous actress in her early twenties whom I recognized as the former second lead on a Disney Channel show I will call
Dixie Peppard, Secret Singer-Songwriter and Witch
. Greta was tagged and the caption was: “Doing booty ballet with my BFF. Can barely walk!” I clicked on this photo and saw even more photos of Greta and Second Lead. Greta and Second Lead in Malibu. Greta and Second Lead at a Dodgers game. Greta and Second Lead at a Beverly Hills hair salon getting “lobs” (long bobs) together.

I had been replaced by a younger model. And now they had matching long bobs.

The sting of being replaced was very painful. Thank God this was pre-Twitter, because I know I would’ve tweeted a lot of angry quotes about betrayal and then later deleted them in a worried state. Greta’s phasing me out of her life hurt way more than Nate. Hell, it hurt way more than most breakups I’d had, and we were only friends for about four months. But as any woman reading this will attest to, there are not many relationships more powerful than that of two women who fall fast and deep into a friendship. It was heartbreaking to be loved and left.

Happily, though, a few months later, work had taken over my entire life, and my friend group was whittled down to the old reliable standbys: Mom, Jocelyn, Brenda, and B.J. None of them would love the term “old reliable standby,” so shhh, don’t tell them. The great thing about true best friends is that when you go MIA for a few months, they inquire but they don’t press. Best friends know the power of infatuation but also how quickly it dissipates. You just have to wait it out. And then afterward, tease them about it for decades.

In the past ten years, I have met a handful of chic and charismatic women in Los Angeles with whom I have had the telltale spark of being “best-friend material.” It’s exciting, like seeing a guy you are really attracted to from across the room at a party. None, however, has managed to infiltrate deep into my best-friend group, where they have seen me openly weep, heard me talk shit about my job, or checked my scalp for worrisome alopecia spots. But one magical summer, Greta was my best friend. And then, like the guy who spends the night and the next morning tells you, “I honestly feel like I’ve never met anyone like you before,” she was gone.

HOW TO GET YOUR OWN TV SHOW (AND NEARLY DIE OF ANXIETY)

T
HOUGH I AM
extremely young, I am old enough to remember Must-See TV. For the small handful of readers who are even younger than me and don’t know what I’m talking about, Must-See TV refers to the Thursday-night lineup on NBC in the ’80s and ’90s, when you could watch back-to-back, amazing, high-quality shows like
Cheers
,
Seinfeld
, and
Friends
. I had the unique experience of being hired to work at NBC in 2004, the year
Friends
ended, which marked the death of that dynasty. Over the next eight years, Must-See TV went from Must-See TV to Pretty Good TV to Not the Worst Thing on TV to Meh, Just Watch HBO TV.

I was lucky enough to be employed at one of the remaining great NBC shows of the mid-2000s,
The Office
. Greg Daniels, the creator of the American version of
The Office
, had plucked me from a strange little off-Broadway play,
Matt and Ben
, which I had cowritten and in which I played Ben Affleck, to write on his show.
¹
In eight years
The Office
went from near-cancellation to the kind of mainstream and critical success where people come up to you and ask, “Is Dwight really like that in real life?” to which I respond: “Oh, no, Rainn isn’t like Dwight. Dwight is an
angel
next to Rainn. Rainn is a demon.”

In the fall of 2011, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had been working on
The Office
for almost eight years. I was thirty-one years old and was one of the few people in TV who felt like I had job stability.

As the success of
The Office
grew, so did my role as a writer and producer, and by season 8 I had written twenty-four episodes. I was invited to be on cool talk shows like
The Tonight Show
and
The Late Show with David Letterman
, and Dave and Paul Shaffer didn’t even have to pretend to know the show that I was on.

I got to see my friend B. J. Novak daily, which, when we weren’t fighting, was the absolute best. Greg and I were nominated for an Emmy for writing the “Niagara” episode, where Jim and Pam get married. But perhaps best of all, I had enough pull that the writers’ assistant kept the fridge stocked with my favorite junk foods—Australian red licorice and Pepperidge Farm cinnamon raisin bread—without my even asking. If that isn’t success and power, I don’t know what is.

Most TV writers, even the good ones, aren’t usually lucky enough to be employed on a great show. And even great shows get canceled. Most writers have to hop from gig to gig to pay for their Priuses and private schools and divorces. I was an exception. I had what most writers dream of: a consistent source of free lunch for eight years. I was a member of the core creative team of what some people considered a classic American comedy, with no end in sight. And did I appreciate it? Um … 
sometimes
?

The truth was, I had started growing a little restless. I had a dream job—was I ungrateful to wonder what more there might be for me? Or complacent if I didn’t? The fights in the writers’ room and the outcomes that didn’t go my way, the one or two great lines a week on-camera, and, of course, the snacks—was there more to life than an endless supply of Australian red licorice (OK, obviously not, that stuff’s amazing, but you know what I mean)?! And who was I to try to seek anything better? In high school I had been cast as a rag-picker/townsperson/vagrant in eight consecutive plays. Why would I think I could be anything more than part of an ensemble of anything? These conflicting feelings about my job were illuminating—I was finally experiencing what they call “White People Problems.” Or, maybe because of my socioeconomic background, this is more of a “First World Problem”? Or a “One Percenter” issue? I can’t pinpoint which conflict of privilege I was experiencing, but you get it.

THE SOMEWHAT YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS

In television, no matter what your title is, no matter how much you contribute, the only person who has the final say is the showrunner.

When you aren’t the showrunner on a TV show, you feel like a highly regarded attorney: you work hard, do the research, and argue your case, but the judge (in this case, Greg, or Paul Lieberstein, who played Toby on the show and became showrunner after Greg) gets to decide what will actually happen.

And though you understand the pecking order and respect the judge—and even if the judge says “Great argument, Counselor Kaling, the court concurs”—you also just want to not have to plead your case all the time. I wanted to be the judge, jury, and executive producer. (See what I did there?)

Here is a taste of the judge-versus-attorney dynamic between Paul and me in the final years at
The Office
.

Paul would give me an assignment, and if I didn’t like it, sometimes I would still do it … but sometimes I would do something else. Then I would turn it in and wait for Paul to read it, hoping he would come out of his office, full of wonder and appreciation at my risk taking. “Mindy, I’m amazed by you,” he would say, awestruck. “Not only did you complete the assignment, you
reinvented
the assignment. You reinvented comedy. Go home. Sleep the sleep of the creatively righteous.”

Instead this is what happened.

PAUL:
Hey. This is not the assignment I gave you.

ME:
I didn’t believe in the assignment you gave me, so I tried something else, and I’m pretty excited about the results, if I may say so—

PAUL:
(
exasperated
) I don’t care if you don’t believe in it, go do it.

I can’t imagine how difficult I was to manage back then. I don’t think Paul could even have imagined it. I still don’t think he believes it. He may have made it into a repressed memory that won’t come out until after years of therapy.

The truth is, if I had a writer on my staff now who behaved like I did, I would throw them out the window of the writers’ room, move their parking space to Structure C (it’s really far away), and make them write 1,000 Morgan Tookers “when I was in prison” jokes.

Though I deserved it probably dozens of times, Paul never actually fired me. (Or, if he did, I never found out about it, because we have the same manager.)

The flip side to our fighting was the fact that I really loved working for him, because he was—and is—one of the most gifted writers I know. He was also a great leader. Methodical and soft-spoken, Paul talked so quietly that sometimes I couldn’t hear him when I was sitting next to him. I was always leaning in and saying “Huh? Heh?” It wasn’t until later that I realized Paul’s quietness was a result of his confidence. He didn’t need to shout to be heard. I don’t have that kind of confidence. My voice is loud and piercing, and I project like I was once told by a doctor during a childhood illness that I would never speak again. Anyone in a mile radius of our studio recognizes the brittle squawk of Mindy Kaling.

I noticed, though, as the years went by, that my passionate arguments became quieter. Part of me attributed it to my maturing and chilling out, but I suspected it might also be something a little more sad. I worried that my well of ideas for what could happen to this group of people working at a small paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was going dry. That feeling was also making me antsy.

Over the course of the series, I had gone from a gleeful and inexperienced writer who couldn’t believe she was in front of a camera to a pretty confident actress. The reason is because I went to the best comedy acting program in the world: the Steve Carell School of Acting.
The Office
was like sitting through a seven-year master class on comic acting led by Steve. At the Steve Carell School of Acting, I saw Steve get handed a page-long monologue, glance at it for twenty seconds, and have it memorized. He could go from craft services, where he could be enjoying a cup of tea and telling a funny story, to set, where, on cue, he could begin weeping like a faucet. When the director said cut, he would go back to his cup of tea and funny story. I once witnessed him make a room full of actors burst into laughter during a scene by improvising the line: “All right, everybody in the conference room! I don’t care if you are gay or straight or a lesbian or overweight! Just get in here, right now!” For letting me watch him do all those things, I really ought to send him some money, but, honestly, he doesn’t need it. He has that sweet
Despicable Me
money.