the mindy project | potential instagrams (insp.)

Danny and Mindy in S02E15

"French me, you idiot."

I don’t know if you know this but..

mindy/danny + kisses

Pilot - Thoughts

I’ve started rewatching the series because, well, season 1 was awesome and I just can’t get enough of it.  I watched the pilot yesterday and, I dunno, maybe it’s because I’m also in the middle of my analytical research paper (anti-orientalist attitudes through the implementation of cultural relativism ….. yeah …. it’s a fun one ……..), but I started examining the episode in a way I hadn’t before and found some things that interested me and that might interest someone else, so I thought I would post them.

The pilot begins with Mindy watching rom-coms and narrating about her life, setting the premise of the show, all that.  She ages from a little girl to a grown doctor.  She says, ”I had no time for any distractions" and we pan to …

The picture is a bit less obvious, but you can still kind of see that Danny is less in focus than Jeremy.  When Mindy mentions ‘distractions,’ we get that she means men, but if we take the camera shot as intentional, we also get the feeling that she means someone like Jeremy.  Jeremy is the one she is ‘focused’ on.

What’s great, though, is that Danny is actually closer and takes up more of the frame.  Talk about foreshadowing.  She’s setting her eyes on Jeremy but Danny’s still there and he’s still a part of the situation - a bigger part of the situation than she currently realizes.

The show goes on and we get scenes like

and

….. Now, this is when I started to feel kind of bad because I always used to criticize the pilot a bit.  I just didn’t seem to enjoy it.  But now I see that, at least in my personal interpretation, what the pilot does really well is explain the title of the show.  This is “The Mindy Project.”  Now, I’m not sure if they’ve stuck with their original premise - shows evolve a lot - but at least at this point I think the show meant that Mindy is a Work in Progress.  She’s the girl who gives drunken speeches and ends up in a stranger’s pool.  Getting her to be who she wants to be (or who she should be) will be a full time project.  As she says at jail or whatever, “Who I’ve been is not who I’m going to be.”  

Mindy has goals for herself.  In the picture with the son and mother, she is at first trying not to take the mother on as a patient because she lacks insurance.  To Mindy, this is a strategy to improve her life.  Later, in the infamous Danny/Mindy scene at the end of the episode, she bemoans her missed chance with guy-played-by-Ed-Helms.  Her logic?  He’s handsome, employed, and he’s the right height for her.  To her, that’s a good deal.  It doesn’t occur to her that, you know, it never would have worked because during their dinner she basically lied about everything she said and tried to be a completely different person from herself.

So The Mindy Project seemed to mean that there is a woman named Mindy who, like most (all) people, is a Work in Progress.  She needs to figure out the right kind of guy for her and she needs to become a better person.  We see that when she chooses to leave Ed Helms and go help mother-without-insurance.

Of course, this is a romantic comedy show, so what must also be a work in progress? - a certain relationship that some people here like to call DANDY.  So that’s where that scene comes in where Mindy makes fun of Danny having an ex-wife and Danny making fun of her weight.  These two people are not ready for each other, but as we see at the end of the episode, they are on a journey to become ‘ready’ for each other.  This is the Mindy (and Danny) Project - even more so as the show goes on.

At the end of the pilot we get the Mindy/Danny scene which is just so great and I could watch it over and over again.  But my favorite thing is that, just as the first scene began with “When Harry Met Sally,” the last scene has the movie in it, too.  And right after Danny gives the “Is he a man?" speech and Mindy accuses him of veering off into talking about himself, Danny first denies it and then admits, "Maybe there’s some overlap" ……. just as this is happening:

So Danny admits that there’s an overlap between the man that he just described and himself just as the screen shows an actual overlap between Danny/Mindy and When Harry Met Sally.  Bravo.  Really, Bravo.

And Danny at first tried to deny the fact that he was talking about himself ….. I mean, he was actually telling her about the kind of man she should go for and he described himself, which is so telling, but at this point, he is no where near ready to come to terms with that.

And he admits to watching her delivery (by the way, he hesitates before saying it - he’s about to drink his coffee but then he lowers it and speaks…this all happens quickly, but still, I think it counts!).  Mindy’s reaction is “I knew it - you were trying to steal my delivery!” (something along those lines) but she doesn’t realize that he was admiring her.

I mean, basically what I mean to say is 1) the pilot is more thought out and strategic than I previously gave it credit for and 2) hot damn I love this show.

Mindy & Danny in “French Me, You Idiot”