Mindy Kaling Reveals The One Theme In All Her Shows, Not Suitable For Work, Never Have I Ever: Female Rage

Mindy Kaling has built a TV empire on messy, hyper-specific coming-of-age stories, but there’s one thread that brings all her shows together: women who rage. And thank God for it.

Chatting to PEDESTRIAN.TV, Kaling opened up about why these women keep showing up across The Mindy Project, Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls, and now Not Suitable For Work. Spoiler: it’s very intentional.

“I love writing about the rage that women feel that they cannot express,” she said to P.TV.

If you’ve ever watched Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), Bela Malhotra (Amrit Kaur), Mindy Lahiri or soon to be Abby (Avantika Vandanapu), you already know exactly what she means. These are not calm, centred women. These are real women, with actual human emotions.

Kaling says that tension, between composure and chaos, is something she keeps coming back to, particularly when writing Asian female characters.

“A lot of that, of course, I explored in the show I created, Never Have I Ever. But especially within our community, I feel like there is this idea that you’re supposed to sublimate those feelings,” she explained.

“Almost every Asian woman I know is at a simmer… of unexpressed emotion.”

It’s that simmer that gives her characters their edge. They’re not always likeable, and they’re definitely not always making good decisions, but they feel painfully real. There’s a kind of honesty and relief in watching someone spiral because they’ve been holding it together for just a bit too long.

Kaling even pointed to a line from Never Have I Ever that perfectly sums up the vibe: “’As Asian women, we’re just supposed to be smile and hand you a cup of tea or some shit’, but that’s not how we really feel.”

And while no one is getting everything right about the South Asian experience, it does feel incredibly refreshing to see desi characters allowed to be messy, angry and chaotic while figuring themselves out. Even if that looks like a 30-something OB/GYN — hello Dr Mindy Lahiri — lying on her office floor after crashing her ex’s wedding. An icon!

Kaling doesn’t always land every note when it comes to representation, but she has undeniably carved out space for brown women to be imperfect. To be loud, emotional, irrational, and yes, a little unhinged. To scream when things feel unfair or overwhelming or just plain batshit.

Even as her shows move through different life stages, from high school to uni to those deeply chaotic early career years, that emotional throughline doesn’t change. The specifics might look different, but the feeling of trying to keep it together while quietly unravelling is universal.

Part of that comes down to how Kaling writes her characters. Rather than creating one clear self-insert, she spreads pieces of herself across everyone on screen.

“The joy of making a TV show is that I get to infuse different parts of my personality, the good and the bad, into all of the characters,” she said.

It also explains why her shows feel so emotionally crowded in the best way. Everyone is a little bit chaotic, a little bit needy, and, yes, a little bit furious.

If you want to see more messy women in their power, Not Suitable For Work premieres on June 2 on Disney+.