![]() ![]() Her Indianness is something she owns happily in one moment and then ditches as quickly as possible in others. Her mixture of rebellion, resentment, and pride in her family background is complex and constantly shifting. It shapes Devi’s life in big ways and small, but Never Have I Ever wields that knowledge deftly. Her heritage makes her different from her friends, yes, but ugh, fine, it’s whatever, can we just move on? Of course she can’t her mother’s needling her to wear a sari rather than a kurta and jeans to Ganesh Puja, and rubbing coconut oil into Kamala’s hair so Kamala’s prospective husband will think she smells like his mother. It is a defining, all-pervasive facet of what this show is.īut Never Have I Ever also treats the fact that Devi comes from an Indian-American family with a giant, somewhat bored, perfectly teenage eye roll. ![]() It makes Never Have I Ever purposely, happily different from the previous white-kids-in-a-white-neighborhood teen rom-com default. Being Indian affects almost every aspect of Devi’s life: It feeds into her mother’s expectations, it’s why her cousin Kamala (Richa Moorjani) lives in their house, it means Devi has to attend long, boring Indian holiday celebrations she’d rather skip, and it changes the way Devi and her mother deal with the grief they’re both trying to grapple with. ![]() Her mother, played by a typically fantastic Poorna Jagannathan, is loving and supportive but doesn’t always click well with her daughter, often misunderstanding or misreading her, and setting expectations that Devi chafes against.ĭevi’s Indianness is a vital part of the show, both in the way it shapes Devi’s story and in the way Never Have I Ever plays into the rom-com genre. She has endearing, thoughtful friends (Ramona Young as Eleanor and Lee Rodriguez as Fabiola) who are ridiculous and sweet and get plenty of time to establish themselves as fully realized characters eventually their needs become important plot points that help balance out all the attention on Devi. She wants to get invited to a party where there’s a lot of drugs and alcohol - not so she can get wasted, but because she wants the opportunity to coolly decline. She wants her arm hair to thin out she knows it’s an Indian thing but it’s just too much. There are so many pleasures in this series, none of which would work if Devi weren’t such a delightful protagonist, an ideal mixture of understandably selfish, self-blind, legitimately funny, fundamentally good, and deeply caring. (Consider this fair warning - the first season premieres in full on Netflix today.) I watched every episode as quickly as I possibly could, and when it ended I was furious I hadn’t forced myself to slow down. ![]() And then I started Never Have I Ever, a new Netflix series created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher and starring Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Devi, a sophomore who had a tragic first year of high school and who’s doing her best to shake it off and move forward. I had no idea I wanted one so badly, that I was aching for some pitch-perfect teen angst injected into the comforting, unshakable framework of a stretched-out love triangle. Without even realizing it, I’ve been missing teen TV rom-coms. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, left, stars in Never Have I Ever as Devi, a delightful protagonist who has endearing, thoughtful friends with stories of their own, Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez), center, and Eleanor (Ramona Young), right. ![]()
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