Created and co-written by Mindy Kaling, the show chronicles a tumultuous school year in the life of Devi, and Indian-American teen living in California and dealing with the semi-recent death of her beloved father, on top of the typical angst and stresses that come along with being a sophomore in high school. Devi is an academic overachiever, but she is itching to expand her experiences into the romantic realm, which until this point have been non-existent due in no small part to her drive for academic success. This starts to change when she develops some small connections with the "It" guy at school - star swimmer and noted ladies man Paxton Hall-Yoshida. This creates more than a little drama in Devi's life, on top of her shifting relationships with her two closest friends. But at the center of most of Devi's troubles are her as-yet unresolved feelings around the sudden loss of her father the year before, which had actually left Devi mysteriously paralyzed from the waist down, due to some sort of shock. She has since mostly avoided confronting the emotional fallout of the tragedy, but it resurfaces in several dramatic and unexpected ways for her.
Never Have I Ever follows many of the patterns and tropes of a typical high school dramedy. Friendships are tested. Romance is often at the forefront. The immediate impulses of teenagers lead to some comical and damaging decisions and consequences. These, of course, lead to revelations about the main characters to us, other characters, and themselves. The broad strokes of the high school narratives are certainly familiar. What gives this show a unique flavor is firstly that Devi's experience as an Indian-American child of immigrants is one really explored in TV before. Mindy Kaling and the other writers obviously knew what they were about here, and the pressures of Devi's mother's native country and culture become a major aspect of the story, rather than just a source of "immigrants think and act funny" line of cheap gags. And then there's the reckoning with Devi's father's death that she and her mother deal with. I have to admit that I found the depiction of her father as being a "perfect Dad" to be a bit uninspired, but this is something that could potentially be explored and expanded in future seasons. And while the story doesn't suggest any mind-blowing novelties around coping with death, it still provides some genuinely touching moments by season's end.
The show is, for the most part, a comedy, and it delivers pretty consistently. The star, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, does a great job as the driven and sometimes overconfident Devi, and Poorna Jagannathan is excellent as Devi's strict, dermatologist mother. Most of the rest of the cast is solid, too, much of it consisting of late teens and early twenty-somethings playing 16- and 17-year olds. The one nuisance was Devi's friend Eleanor, an aspiring actress who never fails to remind us viewers that she's "dramatic," either directly or indirectly. It didn't help that Eleanor's absentee mother - also an aspiring actress - shows up for an episode, is infuriatingly irresponsible, and then leaves. All that aside, the writing and acting is solid. The use of tennis legend John McEnroe as the show's narrator is an obvious oddity at first, and it didn't completely work for me at the beginning, but it eventually makes some sense and becomes a reliable source of humor.
I probably enjoyed this about as much as a white dude, in his mid-forties, without any kids could enjoy a high school teen dramedy. I'll certainly check out a second season, which I assume will happen.
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