“The Mindy Project" 9:30 tonight, Fox
No one ever got rich betting on television to be too original.
So it’s not entirely surprising that among the new fall offerings this year, we have two comedies on separate networks about single doctors who are lucky they don’t screw up in the operating room as often and as they seem to in their personal lives.
“The Mindy Project," premiering tonight, and “Emily Owens MD," coming next month on The CW, vary in overall quality, but both are graced by talented and appealing actresses in the lead roles: Mindy Kaling (“The Office") in the Fox show, and Mamie Gummer (“The Good Wife") in The CW show.
If there’s any kind of competition between the shows, “The Mindy Project," created by Kaling, gets a head start.
Kaling plays a young OB/GYN named Mindy Lahiri who’s been addicted to romantic comedies all her life, to the point where she’s able to recite dialogue from films like “When Harry Met Sally." Unable or unwilling to realize that her rom-com addiction has led her to raise her dating expectations to unrealistic heights, she’s not above getting it on with handsome, womanizing colleague Dr. Jeremy Reed (Ed Weeks) between rounds.
But much of her energy is devoted to trading barbs with another colleague, Dr. Danny Castellano (Chris Messina), who is always ready to steal one of Mindy’s patients when one of her dates goes haywire and she can’t make it back to the hospital in time for a delivery. He’s also ever ready with opinions about Mindy’s wardrobe. Most of all, he says, she’d do well to drop about 15 pounds.
It’s the kind of sniping that inevitably leads to true love in the rom-coms Mindy Lahiri loves so much.
Kaling is good enough to make the C-plus dialogue sound better than it is. She’s got a great deadpan delivery, which is put to better use here than it was on “The Office," where she played also needy but kind of creepy.
“The Mindy Project" couldn’t work without Kaling because we really couldn’t believe a cookie-cutter Hollywood blue-eyed, blonde anorexic being desperate for romance, much less empathize with her. Like “Girls’" Lena Dunham, Kaling is more “real" than most TV sitcom stars.
But she and Dunham have something else in common as well, and that is that their characters may be looking for love, but that doesn’t mean they’re willing to compromise themselves to get it. When Mindy goes on a first date with a guy played by guest star Ed Helms, she fails miserably at being subtle while she directs the conversation to subjects that will reveal his position on drugs and, as we can see from her smartphone checklist, his feelings about the Occupy movement.
It’s challenging to judge a show based on a single episode, but two things are clear from the “Mindy" pilot: First, that the writers need to do some work to make the secondary characters less of a cliche, and, second, that Kaling has the stuff to go the distance.
