“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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