What Netflix’s Never Have I Ever Tells Us About Grieving
Mindy Kaling's new Netflix Show "Never Have I Ever" doesn't necessarily re-invent the wheels of High School comedy. The premise is particularly familiar, and the struggles faced by protagonist Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) aren't at all novel. With that being said, there is a virtue in elevating and executing the Young Adult genre masterfully.
Some of Mindy Kalin's work has the same recurring challenges: a lack of thematic depth and a tired usage of surfaced comedy. We see these gaps in her flagship show "The Mindy Project," her show "Champions" or her adaptation of "Four Weddings & a Funerals." But to my grand surprise, Kalin's "Never Have I Ever" does not suffer from these same issues. The show exceeds expectations, specifically in those domains.
The show follows the life of Indian American high schooler Devi Vishwakumar as she navigates high school, attempts to find a boyfriend, and like any other respectable high school comedy, she also tries to escape the infamous loser label. While we see the same tropes that we too are found in other high school movies such as "The Kissing Booth" or "To All the Boys I loved before," the show's underlying themes are much more complicated. The series revolves around grief and what that grief looks like in a family whose dynamic had consistently been shaky, even before the death in question.
Beyond the grief, the show goes the extra mile in how it represents on screen this idea of coping, of surviving, and more specifically about the process of adjusting to a new life after the passing of a loved one.
As someone who lost both parents by the time I turned nineteen, consistently grieving became part of my identity. As such, I am especially interested in the ways teenage grief is depicted in movies and TV Shows because I am invested in proper media representation. And when it comes to the Young Adult genre, there is nothing writers’ rooms enjoy more than killing off protagonist parents (I am looking directly at you Disney, Pixar & yes even you Netflix).
I’ve compiled a list based on the popular Young Adult movies and series that were the most searched on Google and we get a better view as to how often the main characters start off their storylines with dead parents. Grafting a dead parent to a teenage protagonist is a formula that hasn’t been updated since the late ’‘80s.
Regardless of that formulaic trend, the over-representation of orphaned protagonists isn't inherently a bad thing. If done correctly, a grieving character in a script may create an environment for compelling storytelling and character depth. That is if done correctly.
The unfortunate reality is that most TV writers generally do not know how to write grieving characters that are compelling beyond their grief. Grieving characters often are written in a way that often provides them with a semblance of depth, a series of on-screen, forced, & rarely justified anger. Protagonists with dead parents often expressively show outbursts, audacity, and just plain assholeness. They are seen lashing out against the surviving parent or caregiver, yet we rarely get to explore the underlying grief that motivates these reactions. Feelings of suppression of compartmentation are things that grieving people experience daily, yet are never interweaved in their motivation from neither a storyline nor a character development standpoint.
What distinguishes "Never Have I Ever" from most of the other Young Adult shows is the fact that in crafting Devi's agency and motivation, most of her reactions are implicitly influenced by her grief. Her character as a whole, however, isn't solely defined by it. She would have been a compelling character to follow for ten episodes had both of her parents being alive because the plot doesn't overly rely on her father dying to make Devi's story compelling. Like many girls her age, she is shitty to her friends, she is embarrassed by her Indian heritage, wants to conform, fights with her mom, she has insecurities about herself, and has high school crushes.
Everything that happens in her story arc, as mundane as they are, are influenced by her underlying grief. For instance, her resentment towards her mother stems from their broken dynamic while her dad was alive. She has a crush on Paxton Yoshida-Hall, but her obsession with him comes from a need to escape the pain she feels.
Ultimately that's what I appreciated about the show. As someone who lost both of my parents, Devi's grief was similar to mine. Most days, I was okay, and I went about my daily activities as usual. There were days full of laughter, plotting against the mundane, and going about my life. In-between these ordinary moments of life, I do remember actively suppressing and compartmentalizing aspects related to my dead parents.
When all is said and done, the show isn’t only about death and grieving. beyond having a lot of depth, the show is also seamlessly funny. It’s the type of seamless comedy you see from older writers who don’t force themselves to make GenZ jokes stick. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s heartfelt and it’s extremely well written. If you enjoyed, thoughtful family-centered shows Atypical or Kim’s Convenience. If you love enticing Young Adult work with strong female leads such as Olivia Wilde’s “Book Smart”? There is no reason you wouldn’t en”