'Late Night' Doesn't Quite Dazzle, But It Digs In
When Mindy Kaling, then a writer on The Office, first started appearing on camera as Kelly Kapoor, Kelly was a quiet, unassuming, frumpily dressed office drone like everybody else — another person for Michael Scott (Steve Carell) to mistreat. It was later that they realized what she should be: She should be awful. Kelly should be vain and insufferable and demanding, needy and greedy and self-obsessed. It made Kaling a star.
Then when she got her own show, The Mindy Project, the version of Dr. Mindy Lahiri in the pilot was too bad. She was too dumb and too shallow, and it was suggested that she was an inattentive doctor to her patients. They adjusted Mindy Lahiri, too — they made her a little better, and smarter, and at least a good doctor, even as she retained her off-putting preoccupations with how she was perceived.
It's a balance, you see. It's so hard to get it right when you're a woman in comedy, whether you're justis about.
