Everything Wrong with ‘Never Have I Ever’

Spoilers for season 1 of Never Have I Ever. On its surface, Netflix’s newest teen comedy series Never Have I Ever is an example of progress in diverse representation in media. It stars Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), an uncool sophomore in high school coping with her social status as a nerd and the stunning loss of her father. She’s the “Indian kid,” a fact she doesn’t take with particular pride, but the journey ahead of her would be a coming-of-age story with a positive message for non-white teens who navigate predominately white spaces. Or so I expected. I binged the series partly out of love for one of my favorite genres, coming-of-age teen romance (see To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, The Half of It, and Normal People, to name a recent few), but also by peer pressure from likeminded television fans and movie buffs who live for this sort of thing. That’s how I found myself on a Zoom call venting with African-American, Indian-British, Indian-Australian, and Indian-Australian-living-in-America friends trying to understand what bothered us so much about Never Have I Ever. We stan for diversity and representation. Why weren’t we stanning for this?

Not to bury the lead, the short answer is its writing. More on that in a moment, but the TL;DR version of Never Have I Ever’s problems are a deep pit of missed opportunities, an unclear audience, and a revisiting of certain tropes that are tired if not damaging. Its unfulfilled promise lives somewhere between forfeiting any meaningf…