When Fox announced that it would be airing The Mindy Project, a sitcom by The Office star and writer Mindy Kaling, based in part on Kaling’s own mother’s work as an OB/GYN, I had high hopes. Like many freshman comedies, particularly its timeslot partner New Girl, The Mindy Project had a first season that involved throwing a lot of elements at the wall to see what stuck and what didn’t. Last night’s finale of The Mindy Project, though, contained a near-perfect sequence that united the series’ two core elements, the practice of medicine, and the pursuit of romantic comedy perfect, and provided a terrific template for how the show can follow New Girl‘s lead and level up dramatically in its second season.

Pulled out of a party to celebrate Mindy and Casey’s moving to Haiti for a year that had become an utter disaster after Danny’s ex-wife had praised his androgyny in a photograph, Mindy had tried to get Casey to break up with her by demanding that he propose, and Casey, unaware that he was playing relationship poker, called her bet and asked her to marry him on the advice of “the Notorious G.O.D.” and she freaked out, Mindy, Danny, and Jeremy ran off to deliver triplets. Their display of extreme competence, set, in a flashback to the premiere, to M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls,” not only gave Mindy a professional win and the ensemble a nice character moment, with Jeremy bragging that the triplet that he was responsible for “had the highest Apgar score.” But the willingness of Mindy’s patients to embrace the chaos of triplets also gave her a critical insight in what she needs to have a grand romantic comedy moment, and it isn’t a checklist of compatibility, or a meet cute in an elevator: it was courage. She rushed to Casey’s apartment, delivered a demented speech on the gap between her aspirations to be in a serious relationship and her actual ability to handle her dream scenario, revealed her chopped-off hair, and reunited with her pastor boyfriend.

This is The Mindy Project‘s sweet spot, the interaction between Mindy’s role as an expert in the mechanics of what it takes to have safe sex or deliver a health baby, or what makes an individual moment cinema-worthy, and her total lack of understanding about how two people get to a point where they want to have a baby in the first place. The finest episodes of the show’s first season were the ones where Mindy’s work helped her realize important things about her approach to dating and relationships—and ultimately made a sly argument that even if Mindy has to run out of dates and parties to deliver children, her commitment to her career is actually one of the things that’s helping her make incremental progress towards a healthier personal life.
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In Salon today, my dear friend Willa Paskin has a terrific diagnosis of Fox’s freshman comedy, Ben & Kate, which she says is the sitcom version of a dramedy: emotionally engaging, but too nice to actually be funny in the way we expect comedies to deliver. It was a piece that clarified my growing problems with the network’s other female-centric freshman entrant in Fox’s Tuesday night comedy block, The Mindy Project. What was one of my most hotly-anticipated new shows of fall has turned out to be too unpleasant to have fun with, and a show that sacrifices interesting new territory in the service of its own myopia.

Some of the problem with the show lies in the dynamic between its two main characters, Mindy (Mindy Kaling) and her coworker Danny Castellano (Chris Messina, who I normally like very much). While the two are supposed to be friends as well as coworkers, they’re also the show’s obvious Will-They-Or-Won’t-They couple. But the thought of them together makes that prospect seem more horrifying than charming. In the pilot, for example, Danny told Mindy, in a line laced with some real ugliness, that if she really wanted to look nice for a date that she should lose 15 pounds. One of The Mindy Project‘s most important interests is exploring how romantic comedy tropes play out in the wild, or at least the wild as constituted by Mindy Kaling’s version of her life in which she’s a love-challenged gynecologist. In a conventional romantic comedy, that crack would have been evidence that Danny is the kind of obnoxious person that Mindy will learn to jettison when she meets someone who truly values her for who she is, or that he’s a candidate for a Gerard Butler-style reformation, someone who causes pain to women because he’s in so much of it himself. But The Mindy Project’s riff on it, and on Danny himself, seems to be an affirmation of another cliche: that pick-up artist style put-downs are precisely what proves a guy is desirable.

Some of Danny’s meanness, as when he told Mindy last night that he’s as attached to her as she is her office lamp because “The lamp provides light to that part of the room. You do what you do,” smacks of rivals escalating their war of words. But some of their interactions seem tinged with a genuine cruelty. In last night’s episode, when Mindy decides to have Danny be her gynecologist (an idea that seems terrible and to lack emotional astuteness in any case), their interaction takes a bad turn during Danny’s questions about Mindy’s sex life and family plans. “Do you plan on having children. I’m going to check no,” Danny tells her. “You aren’t married or even in a committed relationship.” Mindy slaps back at him by mentioning his failed marriage, a move that seems like it ought to be off-limits between people who actually have some affection for her. And Danny responds by harshly laying out Mindy’s real prospects for having the four children she tells him she wants to have:

Let’s say you spend the next year or so dating this guy. You’re 33 them. You spend a year getting to know him, 34. Two years living with him, 35, 36. Finally he proposes, you get married, congratulations, you’re 37. You start talking about having kids, but the maternity leave alone is enough to take you out of the game. You spent so long building your career. 38. Now your husband starts resenting how busy you are, he want someone with more free time, but you don’t want to stop working, so he moves out. 39. The divorce is finalized, 40…So you manage to have one kid under the buzzer? Hey, anything can happen.

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Of all the new shows I’ve been monitoring this fall, the one that confounds me the most thus far is The Mindy Project. I had what were almost certainly unfairly high expectations for the program, about a young ob/gyn based in part on Mindy Kaling’s mother, given Kaling’s work on The Office, her status as a fully-developed cross-platform comedic voice, and my enthusiasm for the subject material, including women’s health and medical billing. But I can’t decide if I like the show, in part because I can’t decide if I like its main character.

Low-level female difficulty on television tends to be most interesting if it’s to an end. Liz Lemon’s crazy is the result of a poor work-life balance and in response to the insane expectations of women in Hollywood. Hannah Horvath’s wild vacillations are the result of a girl being told she’s talented but never being expected or forced to turn that talent in any applied direction. So far, Mindy’s damage, seems more like a symptom of bratty entitlement than part of a larger constellation. I appreciated that her character carried out a competent delivery in the first episode, but not so much that it erased my real sense of anger at her for missing another patient’s delivery because she was being a mess and then acting irritated when another doctor got credit for and business out of doing her job. Similarly, the idea that she’d hire a nurse because of a shared affinity for romantic comedies turned me off. Mindy seems more like a child than the grown person with character and nuance the show seems to want me to believe she is, more the supporting character with her love of romantic comedies as a single, defined quirk that provides fuel for recurring jokes, rather than the multi-faceted main character The Mindy Project needs her to be. Some of these elements feel like natural transitions from Kaling’s stint writing and playing Kelly Kapoor on The Office, and perhaps an illustration of some difficulties Kaling is have extricating herself from a character who is drawn closely from her own experiences and viewing Mindy independently as the woman who is ushering her character into the world and into prime time.

But it remains a problem for the show that Mindy is someone who, if I met her in real life, I don’t think I’d want to spend much time with. The bar is lower for people I don’t have to meet in the real world and admits much stranger fictional creations than I’d accept real ones. But they aren’t completely divorced from each other. A character who falls in the dangerous zone of irritating, rather than being either genuinely compelling or a fascinating, illustrative train wreck is a difficult one to attach to.

The Mindy Project also feels to me, so far, like an illustration of why, while it’s really important to have shows that star women of color and women whose bodies don’t fit an exceedingly narrow Hollywood ideal, the presence of both of those conditions is not actually sufficient to make a show good or interesting. It’s nice to see that Kaling didn’t shrink in between her transition from a supporting player to a star. But it’s exhausting to see Danny (Chris Messina), the doctor who is her obvious love interest, tell her, with what seemed like apparent intent to hurt her, that she could stand to lose fifteen pounds. And I thought last week’s episode, in which Kaling repeatedly re-orders frozen yogurt while on a date with Seth Meyers, ended up making her look like a child (something that was also the case during her first-episode date with Ed Helms) rather than saying something sensual and interesting about her appetites or her relationship with food. Maybe Danny will come around about Mindy’s body, maybe the show’s thoughts about Mindy and food, which has popped up as a theme twice, will cohere. But right now, the show is in an odd interim place where more mean about Mindy’s weight than it is either treating her like a normal sitcom star no matter what she looks like or actually examining Mindy’s relationship to her body. I’m not sure it’s progress to put someone of Kaling’s size (which honestly, seems fairly close to mine, and thus not even truly that daring) on television if the joke and character beats feel old and slightly cruel.

Thus far, the show’s perspective on race feels like it’s coming from a bunch of different directions, and I’m more interested in the ways in which they’ll cohere into a complete picture. The scene in the first episode where Mindy, drunk and riding a stolen child’s bike down a dark suburban street, hollers “Racist!” at a driver who honks at her, is a very smart, subtle one-word joke both about the possibilities both that people’s actions are influenced by racism and that charges of racism can be not just spurious but frivolous. The show hasn’t commented directly on what it means for a South Asian woman to covet romantic comedy dreams, though Mindy’s boyfriend, who she meets cute in ideal romantic comedy circumstances, does leave her for a younger, Eastern European woman—the dream is only available to everywomen who meet certain racial and age criteria. Then, there’s her attitudes towards lower-income patients, which is inflected by both class and race. Mindy may act like she has a candy heart with a little boy who translates for his veiled, uinsured mother, telling him to lie to her about their family’s insurance status so she can accept her as a patient, but she complains bitterly about poor patients to her coworkers. That constellation of factors is sharper and more interesting than anything The Mindy Project‘s done with body image or Mindy’s relationship with food, and I think the show might be sharper if her relationship with romantic comedies was filtered through a lens of race and class rather than foregrounded. I understand that romantic comedies are the show’s hook. But I can’t help but wonder if the show would be more interesting if Kaling’s specific perspective on them was a bit more foregrounded so the show would feel like a conversation with a close, smart friend rather than a recapitulation of archetypal story beats.

And really, I suppose, that’s what I’m finding difficult about The Mindy Project, which should be everything I like on television. I need Mindy to give me a reason to keep her around. Because unlike her best friend Gwen, we’re not bound by chains of friendship stretching back to colleges that require me to do hangover maintenance on her and debrief over lunch. We’re still getting to know each other. And so far, though Fox has given the show a full season, I’m not sure whether I want to stay for another drink or another episode.

For more on The Mindy Project, Pitch Perfect, and other pop culture ephemera, check out the latest episode of A Movie and An Argument With Alyssa and Swin:

Back in June when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, I predicted that one of its long-term effects would be on medical procedurals. One of the most common ways for televised doctors to show that they’re compassionate is for them to treat patients even if they don’t have insurance in defiance of hospital administrators’ wishes or their own well-being. The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling’s sitcom about an OB/GYN, which premieres tomorrow on Fox, is making insurance and medical bill collection a core component of its storytelling. It will take a while to get most Americans insured, but as coverage is increasingly standard, medical procedurals will have to find a substitute for that kind of storytelling.

And shows may start incorporating health care reform into their storylines sooner than I even expected. As The New York Times reported on Saturday, California, as part of its efforts to stand up its health care exchange, has hired Oglivy Public Relations to handle a significant campaign to educate state citizens about their obligations and options, and the plan includes major outreach to Hollywood:

Realizing that much of the battle will be in the public relations realm, the exchange has poured significant resources into a detailed marketing plan — developed not by state health bureaucrats but by the global marketing powerhouse Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, which has an initial $900,000 contract with the exchange. The Ogilvy plan includes ideas for reaching an uninsured population that speaks dozens of languages and is scattered through 11 media markets: advertising on coffee cup sleeves at community colleges to reach adult students, for example, and at professional soccer matches to reach young Hispanic men.

And Hollywood, an industry whose major players have been supportive of President Obama and his agenda, will be tapped. Plans are being discussed to pitch a reality television show about “the trials and tribulations of families living without medical coverage,” according to the Ogilvy plan. The exchange will also seek to have prime-time television shows, like “Modern Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and Univision telenovelas, weave the health care law into their plots.

“I’d like to see 10 of the major TV shows, or telenovelas, have people talking about ‘that health insurance thing,’ ” said Peter V. Lee, the exchange’s executive director. “There are good story lines here.”

Now whatever happens will depend on the willingness of shows to play ball—and the extent to which viewers actually understand that the storylines that end up incorporated in the shows reflect accurate information and services that are really available to them. But at a time when Very Special Episodes have become common to the point that there’s nothing very special about them at all, I can’t think of a better reason for shows to explain to viewers that they’re really doing something different than explaining to their audiences that, unlike the miracle doctors on screen, there’s something out there in the real world that can actually make a difference to the uninsured among them.