When Danny Castellano Went to India
Was it so much to ask to see this Staten Island man in a kurta?
Before the writers of The Mindy Project took a sledgehammer to Danny Castellano’s character, he was pretty good at the big romantic gesture. Or at least, he was pretty good at realizing that he was being an ass and sprinting to patch things up with Mindy, usually to the backdrop of an absolute banger. I can’t listen to Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In the Dark” without thinking of him running to the top of the Empire State Building to tell Mindy that he wanted to go all in on their relationship, and Beyoncé’s “XO” will always remind me of him chasing after Mindy when his mom clues him into the fact that she’s pregnant. But the one that always meant the most to me comes in the season three series finale.
Danny has just flaked on meeting Mindy’s parents who are going to India for a year — a year in which Mindy is going to have Danny’s baby. When his mom (played by Rhea Perlman who is perfect in the role) gets through to him with “maybe the problem isn’t marriage, maybe the problem is we picked people who didn’t deserve it,” he realizes he messed up. We see Danny get in a taxi and an airplane, apparently to fly to a wedding he’s supposed to attend in Texas. But then “L.E.S. Artistes” by Santigold plays as Danny lands in his actual destination: Mumbai. He knocks on Mindy’s parents’ door and announces “I’m Danny Castellano and I’m in love with your daughter.”
Staten Island is much too far from midtown Manhattan for Danny to drag Mindy to dinner with his Ma every week, but hopping on a flight in India is actually a long journey. This was a real romantic gesture. When I first watched The Mindy Project, I loved the last few seconds of this episode more than any other scene — and considering the earlier ones involve Laura Dern playing Mindy’s gynecologist with a thick eastern European accent for no reason and the hilarious round up of Mindy’s exes including BJ Novak and Max Greenfield, that’s saying something. But when I recently revisited the episode and the one that follows, I wasn’t as charmed by Danny sweating his way to Mindy’s parents front door as I remembered.
The scene dangled in front of us the potential that Mindy (the character, but also the show’s creator) was going to finally explore in depth what it meant for their relationship to be between a child of Indian immigrants and a born and bred New Yorker who won’t shut up about the Yankees. Before Danny gets to Mindy’s parents, we witness a few seconds of the bustling streets of one of India’s most populated cities. He’s dodging women in sarees, passing dozens of street vendors and traveling by auto rickshaw. I got my hopes up again even though I knew better on this rewatch. A Danny-Castellano-navigating-the-streets-of-Mumbai episode would have been all-time. Instead, what we got was a whole lot of the inside of Mindy’s parents’ apartment and a pretty stereotypical episode in which they’re trying to arrange her marriage. It’s a missed opportunity that is nearly as unforgivable to me as the downfall of Danny’s character in general.
The context of my rewatch is that I’m currently writing this from my grandmother’s apartment in New Delhi during the final days of my fiancé’s first trip to India. More than thirty years ago, my father brought my mother — a born and bred New Jerseyan whose father loved the Yankees — from the U.S. to India to meet our family. Seeing a similar dynamic playing out on screen is something that would have made me feel seen in a way only TV can. Rachel and I started this newsletter in the first place to talk all about how the medium has shaped who we are. It’s helped form how we think of healthy relationships, allowed us to examine our friendships and taught us how to grieve. But being half-Indian has always been a huge part of my identity, and reckoning with how culturally different two halves of me are is something television has rarely been able to help with.
That’s not to say intercultural relationships haven’t played out on the small screen, of course. Jane the Virgin follows a Venezuelan-American woman navigating motherhood while in a relationship with a white man from Miami (who later gets amnesia and thinks he’s a white man from Montana named Jason… I should rewatch this bonkers show) and an Italian man. There’s Lane and Zack on Gilmore Girls, Gloria and Jay on Modern Family, Shawn and Angela on Boy Meets World. We snuck To All The Boys I Loved Before into our TV boyfriends post last week, so I’ll throw Lara Jean and Peter Kavinsky in there, too. The list goes on. And when it comes to intercultural relationships in which one partner is of South Asian descent, I am sorry to admit I’m not a New Girl girl, though writing this is making me want to revisit so I can see if Cece Parekh and Schmidt’s relationship lives up to the hype. But that show still couldn’t have given me what Mindy Kaling could have with the Castellano-Lahiri relationship: An on-screen intercultural relationship involving an Indian-American woman on a show that is created by an Indian-American woman.
A lot of people have become disappointed with Mindy Kaling during the years since The Office when we fell in love with her as Kelly Kapoor, the business bitch. The controversy came to a head last year with the release of Velma, HBO’s animated series about the Scooby-Doo character that Kaling voiced and executive produced. In this new version, Velma is Indian, but her other characteristics brought about widespread criticism of how Mindy writes characters of young Indian women and girls (Mindy Lahiri, Devi Vishwakumar on Never Have I Ever and Bela Malhotra on The Sex Lives of College Girls) in general: insecure, embarrassed of their culture and addicted to white men who treat them badly. As is often the case of online discourse1, the Mindy controversy became so overwhelming that, in the words of a Buzzfeed News essay, it lost all nuance. But it did bring up important points about the self-hatred of Mindy’s Indian characters and the anti-Islam sentiments recklessly used by the characters in her shows from Hindu communities.
So much has been written about how harmful it is that Devi is ashamed of her dark arm hair and that Bela calls herself an “Indian loser.” And Mindy Project fans seem to have collectively agreed that the show went downhill when Mindy had a kid mostly because of Danny’s descent into a controlling partner who wants Mindy to quit her job to stay at home and tries to get her pregnant without her knowledge. But I think the episode when Danny went to India and apparently didn’t see any of India is when things fell apart for me.
Danny and Morgan (played by Ike Barinholtz, who does at least enhance any scene he’s in) are in a showdown throughout the episode with Danny trying to convince Mindy’s parents she shouldn’t have an arranged marriage without letting on that he’s the father of her baby, and Morgan trying to get Danny to come clean. Before they begin to page through suitable men being considered for Mindy, Danny calls arranged marriages “medieval,” only to find out that Mindy’s parents’ marriage was arranged. As the episode continues, and they actually meet one of the men who could be an ideal match for Mindy, Danny gets a front-row seat to how Mindy’s parents actually function as a couple. They support one another’s dreams, they listen to each other, they’re honest. It’s clear Danny has a thing or two (or a hundred) to learn from them, and eventually he apologies for insulting their marriage. It’s the closest we get to Danny acknowledging that just because something is unfamiliar to him doesn’t mean it’s wrong, and it’s too bad that it only happens within the context of one tradition that western audiences have seen portrayed over and over again and are somewhat fascinated by.
Rewatching, I wonder why Mindy Kaling chose not to portray any of India, a country so rich with history and culture, and so vast that she would really have only been able to show a tiny slice anyway. I can only speculate, but I wonder if Kaling didn’t want to portray something that felt somewhat distant from her. Kaling grew up in the suburbs of Boston and later attended the equally-famous-for-it’s-diversity Dartmouth College. My upbringing was much more similar to hers than to that of my cousins in India, and even writing this essay, I had to push myself to speak personally about my time overseas. It’s scary to write about something you don’t feel like you have any authority over, and having just one foot in a culture will do that to you. Or perhaps, like she told Vogue India in 2020, she didn’t want to feel as though the character was educating white people, which is fair. But if that’s the case, why tease us with this episode at all? As an audience, we had by then listened to Danny talk about things like the little radio he listens to baseball on, Bob Dylan and his Ma’s lasagna for three seasons straight. And as Zeahaa Rehman wrote for Catapult in one of my favorite critiques of the show, we never saw “the small and mundane ways in which Mindy’s race and ethnic background affected her — things like getting Indian food for lunch, or devouring a desi snack from her childhood after a hard day, like nimko or Bombay mix.” Instead, Mindy (the character) rejected her family’s influence. So it makes sense that Danny never had to hear about the little details of Mindy’s life that made her Mindy, and that he never had to compromise his comfort in exchange for learning something new.
I would have loved to see Danny Castellano bumble through an interaction with the guy who sells chaat from a cart down the street or struggle to communicate his destination with his rickshaw driver. I wanted to see him unable to refuse a second and third and fourth helping from Mindy’s aunties, his eyes watering as he reached for dahi, or hear his confusion at why he was being invited to Mindy’s cousin’s neighbor’s friend’s wedding. I wanted to see him wear a kurta or get a lecture after saying he doesn’t know who Amitabh Bachchan is or at least eat some Maggi noodles. Love isn’t getting on the airplane, it’s being uncomfortable and being okay with that. Watching Danny try to understand and appreciate Mindy’s family’s culture would have been the most romantic thing he could have done.
This past week I saw my fiancé take a break from studying western medicine to learn about Ayurvedic practices from my grandmother’s yoga instructor, take a tour of a Sikh temple with a man who spoke no English and try Bengali sweets, just to name a few. Watching him navigate this world that is so unfamiliar to him, I realized how ripe for comedy and romance this kind of travel is and I wonder why The Mindy Project wouldn't want to take advantage of that.
Mindy Kaling has a lot on her shoulders. She has been lauded for creating Indian characters who are not defined by their ethnicity, criticized for writing them so that they’re embarrassed of their culture, praised as a Hollywood juggernaut and condemned for not using that power to bring about more authentic on-screen representation. But when you write a character like Mindy Lahiri, who morphed herself into someone she wasn’t just to appease Danny and his Italian-American family, is it irresponsible to never force him to do the same, even when he’s traveled all the way across the world to a place so unfamiliar to him? At the least, it’s unfair.
There have been rumors over the years about a Mindy Project reunion, which I doubt will ever happen. But if it does, I want a big Indian wedding for Danny and Mindy. I want a Baraat for Danny, horse and all. I want them to play “Maahi Ve” from Kal Ho Naa Ho. I want Mindy in the most beautiful saree we’ve ever seen — and not just so she can get her son into a prestigious school. At the very least, I want the show to acknowledge that intercultural relationships are rich for storytelling. Maybe, like my fiancé once did at a restaurant, Danny can get made fun of for ordering a “cheese dosa,” laugh at himself and ask what he should order next time.
B Plot
Question: What has been your favorite online TV discourse?
Mallika: It’s difficult to say this is my favorite because it caused me extreme distress at the time, but to this day I still think about “the Cuties story.” For those of you who are lucky enough to not know what I am talking about, during the end-of-season reunion of Love Is Blind season 3, one couple whose engagement went up in flames at the altar reflected on what went wrong. The woman, Zanab, accused the guy, Cole, of a lot including a story that was analyzed as if it were sacred text so I shall share it with you word-for-word: “It was like 2 p.m. we were still filming, I hadn’t had a chance to eat, so I grabbed two Cuties—little, tiny oranges that fit in the palm of your hand. He looked at me and he goes, ‘Are you gonna eat both of those?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah. That’s a serving.’ And he goes, ‘Well, we’re going out to eat later. Maybe you should save your appetite.’” Cole denies he ever controlled her eating, and tells the camera that if Netflix has that scene, they should air it — and so they did, beginning what became an all out online war over the incredibly ambiguous interaction. I think this was my most memorable discourse because I changed my mind with seemingly every new opinion I read. Cole probably didn’t mean anything by it. But it hurt Zanab’s feelings. But he shouldn’t be accused of something so bad if it’s not clear that what he was doing. But she was clearly trying to tell him she was upset about something. It’s more than a year later and I’ll still try to solidify my position the next time I eat a Cutie.
Rachel: I always love/hate it when journalism is the subject of online TV discourse. Right now, Twitter is reminiscing on the absolutely delulu perception rom coms had of what a job at a magazine looks like. There’s about to be a new Bold Type-style show about political reporters and I pray my feed will be as alight with opinions as it was when Amy Adams put Chris Messina’s hands down her pants in Sharp Objects or when Connie Britton absolutely decimated Alexandria Daddario over that silly listicle in White Lotus (naming that character Rachel felt like a personal affront). The worst/best might have been Rory Gilmore’s media hellscape in 2016’s GG revival A Year in the Life. Girlina had like four phones and called David Foster Wallace David Wallace like they were on a two name basis (sweetie). The material was RIPE and the jokes were good though I don’t remember any as that was tragically eight years ago.
C Plot
Unclear why anyone would ever mess with Jodie Foster and Kali Reis of all people, but Nic Pizzolatto — the creator of True Detective who ran the show until Issa López took over for the fourth season that just concluded — continues to bash the show, most recently reposting critical comments of the season finale. We’ve said it before but need we remind this man of season two? And what about season three, which scraped by solely because of Mahershala Ali and Carmen Ejogo’s charisma? The way Pizzolatto is still riding the high of season one is giving Andy from The Office talking about the glory days of the Cornell a Capella group. Reis is having none of it and joke’s on Nic because True Detective just got a season five and López is in charge again.
One thing we will always love about Mischa Barton is her ability to throw a complete grenade and not give a hoot about it. The actress recently said that she secretly dated co-star and on-screen love interest Ben McKenzie on The O.C. Rumors have swirled about this romance for years but they always denied it — and for good reason: Barton was 17 when she started the show and McKenzie, 25. The fact that Barton held on to this little secret when she appeared on the rewatch podcast with Rachel Bilson and Melinda Clarke, then stayed tight-lipped about it for the recent oral history, just to drop it on “Call Her Daddy”… she lives for the drama and so we live for her.
Kelly Bishop is publishing a memoir! Happy Day! But she is titling it “The Third Gilmore Girl.” Honey, you are the first Gilmore girl. To some, the only Gilmore girl. Emily did not say “Well then buy me a boa and drive me to Reno because I am OPEN for business” in response to Richard telling her only prostitutes have two glasses of wine at lunch to be disrespected this way! Regardless, we are excited and hopeful that Bishop’s book will be full of candor and hopefully a few reads. Who will get the Alan Rickman-style “he’s not really an actor but he’ll probably write and direct” snide comment? Our bet is on Jared Padalecki.
I quickly lost the thread on the woman who handed $50,000 over to a stranger in a shoebox — how did it end? Are we mad at her still? Are we mad at the people who were mad at her or the people who were mad at the people who were mad at her?