![]() ![]() And then, as if it wasn’t eerie enough, a friend texted to tell me they made a show about me on Netflix. And like Devi, I had snubbed my heritage, learning to embrace it only later in life. Like Devi, I wasn’t always a good friend, too blinded by grief to see my friends’ challenges. The similarities in Devi’s story and my own were striking: her close relationship with her dad, Mohan, and the immense grief she felt after he died mirrored my own (I cried every single time Sendhil Ramamurthy appeared on screen) her complicated relationship with her mom, the remaining parent who just didn’t get her. Devi is the heroine I wish I had back then: a brown, nerdy, angry teenager who had just lost her dad (and is dying to have sex, and has too much hair on her arms). Watching Devi Vishwakumar was like watching myself as a teen. She’s done it with the diversely cast TV adaptation of Four Weddings and a Funeral (which was exactly the mindless fun I had expected Never Have I Ever to be, and while we’re on the subject, how dreamy is Cash?).īut Never Have I Ever hit even closer to home. Over the years I’ve grown to admire Kaling even more for her commitment to inclusivity and for changing the face of mainstream television. Finally, a heroine who was brown, sexy, smart, and hilarious, who loved food and sex and loud patterns. Perhaps this was the reason I fell in love with Mindy Kaling, the creator of Never Have I Ever, when she starred in her series, The Mindy Project. As children rights’ advocate Marian Wright Edelman famously said, you can’t be what you don’t see. You might wonder whether your dream to become an author is within reach. You may spend your childhood and adolescence writing stories about white people, as I did. ![]() And when you grow into this reality, you don’t question it. Just as she was nowhere to be found in literature. In the eyes of a Yemeni Jewish Israeli girl, that made her almost as exotic as Kelly. ![]() As for her Jewishness, Andrea was an American Jew, an ethnic group that didn’t suffer from a lack of representation on screen. Perhaps it was her position as a token sidekick that made her unrelatable, or her uncomfortable-to-watch neurosis (I was angry and depressed as a teen, not neurotic). I chose Brenda because she was new in town and less blonde, and therefore “the other.” Andrea Zuckerman, the only somewhat diverse character in the show, was not an option, despite the fact that we were both Jewish. In high school I was obsessed with Beverly Hills 90210, where the choice of characters to relate to was limited to Brenda or Kelly (because no self-respecting teenage girl would have ever related to Donna). What I didn’t expect was to discover my new favorite TV character, be moved to tears by almost every episode, and to feel seen in mainstream television, perhaps for the first time ever. When I first caught sight of the trailer for Never Have I Ever, Netflix’s new teen sitcom, I expected a lighthearted comedy I may want to put on while cooking. ![]()
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