Never Have I Ever - Season 1

“Never Have I Ever perplexingly dabbles in casual Islamophobia, ableism, and fatphobia.”

Title: Never Have I Ever
Episodes Reviewed: Season 1
Creators: Mindy Kaling 👩🏽🇺🇸 and Lang Fisher 👩🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Mindy Kaling 👩🏽🇺🇸 (2 eps), Lang Fisher 👩🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Justin Noble 👨🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), Amina Munir 👩🏽🇺🇸 (1 ep), Akshara Sekar 👩🏽🇺🇸(1 ep), Aaron Geary 👨🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), Ben Steiner 👨🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), Chris Schleicher 👨🏼🇺🇸(2 eps), Erica Oyama 👩🏻🇺🇸(1 ep), and Matt Warburton 👨🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep)

Reviewed by Nick 👨🏽🇹🇹🇺🇸

5/27/2020: Updated Disability category

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 4.5/5

Netflix’s Never Have I Ever hits a variety of emotional beats while maintaining a tight 30-minute structure. Classified as either a coming-of-age story or a teen sex romp, Mindy Kaling’s latest project—co-created with Lang Fisher (The Mindy Project, Brooklyn Nine-Nine)—actually lands somewhere in the middle. The show’s breezy pace and high production values give it a confident style that commands your attention. In addition to being entertaining and well-executed, it offers something relatively new to the landscape of media representation.

Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), the show’s Indian American protagonist, desperately wants to overcome her reputation as an “uncool” overachiever. She attempts to accomplish this by single-mindedly pursuing her crush, Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet). Her hope is that Paxton will help her lose her virginity. While Devi clumsily tries to check this box, the show balances her comic misadventures with an emotional throughline: an ongoing struggle to process the sudden and traumatic death of her father, Mohan (Sendhil Ramamurthy).

Despite its heavy material, the tone of the show remains light and appropriately raunchy given its cast of hormonal teenagers. Performances impress, assuredly led by Tamil Canadian Ramakrishnan as Devi. Her dynamic screen presence enables both comedy and vulnerability, lending depth to the show’s themes of grief and gendered societal expectations. Overall, Devi is portrayed with ambitions, desires, and anxieties. It’s refreshing to watch an Indian American teenager navigate a wide range of human emotion and make mistakes without rushing to explain herself.

Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Devi lives with her mother Nalini (Poorna Jagannathan) in the house where she grew up. Her cousin Kamala (Richa Moorjani) also joins them while she finishes her Ph.D in the United States. The strongest emotional bonds forged throughout Never Have I Ever come from these women making a home as they contend with their relationships to one another, and to themselves.

Even though their discussions and conflicts sometimes involve men—such as Mohan, or Kamala’s secret boyfriend Steve (Eddie Liu) and marriage prospect Prashant (Rushi Kota), or Devi’s crush Paxton—these women exist far beyond those relationships. For example, Mohan’s death uncovers fractures between Devi and her mother, with Nalini emotionally closing herself off as a defense mechanism and thus, giving Devi reason to doubt her mother’s love.

Meanwhile, Kamala—who represents and ostensibly performs traditional femininity—illustrates how society finds it easier to accept her than someone more stubborn and less conformist, like Devi. Even Nalini initially seems to reinforce problematic expectations, such as the idea that Kamala will be more valuable to a man with better cooking skills. But by season’s end, the women come to an understanding as it’s made clear how Nalini simply wants her family members to have every possible chance at happiness.

In addition to the domestic lives of the Vishwakumars, Never Have I Ever also follows the trio of Devi and her best friends Fabiola Torres (Lee Rodriguez) and Eleanor Wong (Ramona Young). Their concerns span everything from niche interests like theater and robotics to more sensitive matters. From this core group, other female-centric storylines spiral out such as Eleanor’s difficult relationship with her estranged mother and Fabiola’s budding crush on a girl named Eve (Christina Kartchner). The sheer array of subplots help the show transcend individual tropes, as Kaling and Fisher examine the hearts of the women it centers from multiple angles.

Race: 4/5

Never Have I Ever primarily explores the Tamil and upper class perspectives of the Vishwakumars and their immediate social spheres. While some universality can be extracted, by no means are they meant to convey the entire Indian American experience. Stories about the show’s familial trio of women—Devi, Nalina, and Kamala—are nuanced and connected to their specific identities. Together, they present a relatively deep understanding of a small demographic.

Devi selectively rejects and leans into her Indian heritage in ways that differ from how other Desis may process their own stories. As Radhika Menon puts it, “None of this sounds like my experience growing up, and that’s the beauty of it.”

Devi’s mother Nalini represents the immigrant angle, showing how people navigate the various stereotypes projected upon them by American society. While she does exemplify the kind of “model minority” begrudgingly allowed into affluent spaces—due to her position as an accomplished dermatologist living in a sought-after California suburb—Nalini feels complex thanks to her vulnerabilities. She grieves over Mohan but finds small joys in life and musters the courage to move forward by season’s end. It’s wonderful to see an example of an Indian woman seizing life beyond the passing of her husband.

Then we have Kamala, a kind and high-achieving “good Indian girl” that her elder relatives would like to marry off. While she desires autonomy and the freedom to explore romance on her own terms, she genuinely cares about honoring her family’s wishes. The vast differences between Kamala’s respectful approach and Devi’s rebellious stance show both ends of the spectrum of what it means to be an upper-middle-class Tamil woman in American society.

That said, Never Have I Ever definitely has its blind spots. Two characters in particular miss the mark: Niecy Nash as Devi’s therapist and Darren Barnett as Devi’s crush. The casting of Nash perpetuates the media trope of a Black woman as a mental health professional, seen through characters like Dr. Akopian (Michael Hyatt) in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or Justina Jordan (Samira Wiley) on You’re the Worst. Time and time again, Black women are seen performing emotional labor for the main characters of a series.

In the case of Darren Barnett, the Japanese heritage of his character Paxton Hall-Yoshida exists mostly as window dressing. This footnote isn’t engaged with beyond the repetition of his hyphenated last name, one brief scene where he speaks iffy Japanese on the phone, and the moment when Paxton’s dudebro friend belatedly realizes he’s part Japanese. The sense of using his identity as a party trick feels shallow. Combined with the roles of Fabiola and Eleanor, whose ethnicities are glaringly absent from any onscreen mention, the supporting characters of Never Have I Ever can feel more like a grasp at skin-deep diversity than meaningful representation.

LGBTQ: 4/5

As one of the show’s most important supporting characters, Fabiola spends the entire season coming to terms with her identity as a lesbian and eventually comes out to her mother. Each moment leading up to the breakthrough—from first telling her robot that she’s gay before confessing to a human friend, Eleanor—feels tender and patient. Better yet is the positive reaction she gets from her crush, Eve, who is already out as gay. The fact that the show gives Fabiola’s story so much space speaks to an embrace of that story as necessary and complex.

Deduction for Religion: -1.00

Casual Islamophobia unfortunately peppers the first season of Never Have I Ever. In Episode 4, during a Ganesh Puja celebration where groups of Hindu women are socializing, Kamala befriends a woman named Jaya (Aarti Mann). She has been shunned for both marrying a Muslim and getting divorced. The latter serves as comedic fodder among the somewhat cartoonishly judgmental Indian aunties at the celebration. Given that Jaya only has a few speaking lines that convey tremendous regret for her decisions, the show’s treatment of her character could easily be interpreted as Islamaphobic.

Following these already cringeworthy moments, Nalini goes on to praise Narendra Modi while she gives a ride home to Pundit Jay, a well-known Hindu religious leader played by Anjul Nigam. The fact that Nalini affirms her “good Hindu” status by respectfully mentioning Modi—a Hindu nationalist currently enacting extreme policies designed to harm Muslims—is troubling and feels blithe to the current political tensions simmering in India. Put simply, it’s irresponsible to portray a protagonist like Nalini as neutral toward systemic Islamophobia. This is a Netflix show that millions of people will see. Normalizing things that could harm people has significant consequences when done on such a large platform.

Deduction for Body Diversity: -0.50

Never Have I Ever perplexingly dabbles in more than just Islamophobia. Eric Perkins (Jack Seavor McDonald) holds a recurring role as Devi’s classmate who unfortunately shoulders the weight of the scripts’ fatphobic jokes. With his bodily functions used as punchlines—diarrhea from drinking spoiled milk, or pratfalling as his Raisinets skitter across the hallway—Eric generally serves as an obnoxious disruption to the show’s main cast. In one episode, he makes an awkward pass at Kamala that has nothing to do with the plot. Moments like this reinforce toxic associations between weight and desirability or aptitude, amounting to a disheartening embrace of fat bodies as comedic fodder.

Deduction for Disability: -0.50

From the get-go, Devi’s paralysis that has her using a wheelchair during the pilot strikes an odd note. While the story of her psychosomatic disability is based on the true experience of Fisher’s brother, who “had about four months when his legs were paralyzed” following the divorce of their parents, the fact remains that seeing Devi miraculously walk her following year at high school perpetuates the hugely damaging trope that people with disabilities are “faking it”—and stirs up other negative outcomes too, as shared by this young wheelchair user in her video. Given this challenging setup, the ableist jokes thrown at Devi feel that much tougher to chalk up to harmless teen ribbing. Ultimately, unintended consequences are still consequences, and viewers have a right to be frustrated by what they see onscreen, even without knowing the behind-the-scenes context.

On the flipside, Never Have I Ever does cast two actors with visible disabilities: Paxton’s sister Rebecca is played by Lily D. Moore, who has Down Syndrome, while Atticus Shaffer, known only as “Russia” in the episode where he joins Devi and her classmates for a Model UN retreat, has brittle bone disease. While it’s positive that no offensive jokes are made on their behalf, their disabilities are mostly ignored by the other characters—a shallow play that is better than nothing but hardly moves the conversation forward, especially given its palpable ableism early in the season.

Mediaversity Grade: B 3.88/5

Never Have I Ever certainly has some things to iron out, especially its strange and intermittent obliviousness. But it does represent steps forward for Mindy Kaling as a creator, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as a confident lead, and Netflix as a platform for artists from traditionally marginalized groups.

Overall, the show does feature sharp humor, extreme watchability, and empathy for certain minority groups. Devi represents a powerful image for young Indian and Indian American women to have as they negotiate the messiness of growing up.

Like Never Have I Ever? Try these other comedies featuring lovesick teenagers.

Grade: BLiMay 26, 2020Great for: Gender, Female/Nonbinary Creator