“You have an idea of how your life will turn out,” muses Mindy Lahiri, introducing herself in the pilot episode of Fox’s new sitcom The Mindy Project which debuted in September. “When I was a kid, all I did was watch romantic comedies in our living room while I did my homework,” she tells us in voice-over as we see clips of her at various ages watching videos of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and Four Weddings and Funeral. She kept watching romantic comedies obsessively through college, and while she managed to finish medical school and become an OB/GYN, her love life has not turned out to be like the movies—she was recently dumped by a long-time boyfriend, and just last night humiliated herself at his wedding with a vengeful, drunken toast in which she suggested that his Serbian bride was a war criminal.
The Mindy Project, created by comedian and writer Mindy Kaling, who also stars as the fictional Mindy, is staging television’s version of the quixotic plot. Mindy might love watching When Harry Met Sally, but she is a character in a television sitcom, not a Hollywood romantic comedy, so we can be pretty sure that her own romantic life is going to be different from Sally Albright’s: Mindy is going to be unlucky in love. Not just in the pilot episode or during the first season, but probably for years, or as long as the show is renewed. Even if she starts seeing someone seriously, the relationship will be volatile and probably won’t last more than a season or two, at most.
Sitcoms like The Mindy Project, of course, are at least as convention-bound as romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally. But because of the conditions of their production, they tend to have something in common with life itself: no one knows in advance when they’re going to end. The full arc of a TV series is not usually mapped out in advance, the show is subject to abrupt cancellation, and there is no artistic consensus on how to handle its conclusion even when writers know that the end is coming; a television series might have an elaborate finale or simply finish out a given season without fanfare. All this gives most sitcoms a certain sense of indeterminacy—we’re bound for no obvious destination—that also applies to the characters’ relationships. As long as each episode has its own tidy, reassuring little ending, audiences tolerate a great deal of open-endedness when it comes to the hero or heroine’s romantic life. And what those tidy little endings are reassuring us about, much of the time, is the fact that the characters are not alone even when they remain romantically unattached and hapless; they have friends, family, colleagues—stability, in other words, even without being married. Sitcoms offer a salve for the bruises of urban single life.
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