Me & Mindy: Why I Love The Mindy Project

Listen, it’s hard for me to believe that there is another 30-something Black woman out there addicted to The Mindy Project, a show written/produced/starred in by Mindy Kaling, a former writer and actress on The Office, but I believe it. I’m used to this feeling, though. I had the same feeling in high school when I would head to class looking for an eye-to-eye connect with a brown girl who had also spent the night toiling over Dawson and Joey’s love/despair. I felt this way in college while talking about The Gilmore Girls with folks who looked exactly like Rory and less like Lane or me. By my mid-twenties, I’d given up. There is no one on this earth into the shows that I love. Don’t get me wrong, I hung with Mr. Copper with the best of them and wanted Khadija to be my roommate. It’s just that, those stories weren’t mine. I wasn’t the same age as the characters and I wasn’t going through the same growing pains at the same time as them. I laughed at them and cried for them, we never experienced those things together. Then, last year, I sat on my sofa in a sulk that was due to an intolerable amount of adulting and too little time. I grabbed my wine glass with one hand, my remote with the other and went to Hulu in search of some mindless show that would make me forget the woes of my responsibility-laden single life. I was Olivia Poped out, I needed a funny rom-com to get me over the hump. And there she was, this brown girl with bright eyes and whimsical pattern pairings. “Sure, I …