Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s high-school comedy is loud, quick and warmer than it first lets on. The jokes are fine. The mother and daughter arguing in the kitchen are the reason to keep going, across all four seasons.
Never Have I Ever is an American high-school comedy of a familiar shape: a clever girl wants the handsome boy, her friends have subplots, a rival turns out to be more than a rival. Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher have put an Indian-American family in the middle of that shape and grief underneath it, and the result, over four seasons of ten episodes between 2020 and 2023, is a good series that is at its best when it stays at home. The school is where the jokes are. The house is where the show is.
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan plays Devi as rude, greedy for attention and quick to anger, and the writers never sand her down into somebody easier to like. She lies to her friends, shouts at her mother and asks a boy she has barely met to sleep with her, and Ramakrishnan makes all of it read as grief looking for somewhere to go. It is a proper lead performance. The narration by John McEnroe is the gamble, and the first episode gives its reason, which we will leave it to give. A man famous for losing his temper on a tennis court describing a girl who cannot keep hers is a better joke than it sounds, and it settles into something almost tender. When the series hands the microphone to a guest narrator for an episode, as it does in the second season, the trick shows its workings and we missed him.
Poorna Jagannathan is the reason we kept watching. She plays Nalini as a woman holding a household together by refusing to sit down. Her arguments with Devi in the kitchen are the sharpest writing the show has; both of them are right and both of them are cruel and nobody apologises properly. We had settled in for a sitcom, and the grief the first episode carries underneath the jokes caught us off guard. We were not ready to be upset by this show, and we were, and it happened again whenever those two were alone in a room. Richa Moorjani’s Kamala, the beautiful cousin who has moved in, gives the house a third woman to argue about what a good daughter is.
Rhet Bear shoots the suburb in flat, bright sunshine, so that even the sad scenes happen under a blue sky, and the school corridors are lit like an advertisement. Kathleen Widomski’s Vishwakumar house is the better set: a prayer room with a garland on a photograph, a kitchen with too many things on the counter, a bedroom that a teenager and her mother have plainly fought over. Salvador Pérez Jr. and Glinda Suarez dress Devi in loud prints that are trying slightly too hard and Paxton in the same plain shirts, which tells you who is comfortable. Joseph Stephens’s music does little and is not asked to; the pop songs carry the montages.
What does not hold is the triangle. Darren Barnet plays Paxton as a boy who has noticed that being handsome is not a plan, and he is better than the part needs him to be. Jaren Lewison’s Ben is a rich, lonely, needling boy who grows on us as he grows on Devi. But by the third season the back-and-forth between them has run out of road, and the series starts telling us Devi has changed, in narration and in therapy scenes, rather than showing her do anything differently. An early storyline about disability is played for a laugh the show has not earned, and it is the one thing most critics who liked the series also picked at. Lee Rodriguez and Ramona Young are good company, though their storylines are switched on and off as the episode count requires.
Most teen comedies of this kind are about the school. This one is about a family that happens to contain a teenager, and it is a better series every time it remembers that. It carries a 12 certificate and it is brisk; each season can be seen in a few evenings, and the fourth ends the thing properly, which is rarer than it should be. Watch it with someone who has a mother.
