This new coming-of-age series has real-life inspiration. On Wednesday, Variety reported that Netflix ordered a 10-episode comedy series based on the childhood of Mindy Kaling, who co-created the show with Lang Fisher. The pair will reportedly co-executive produce alongside Howard Klein and David Miner, with Universal Television set to produce the new series. Here’s what we know about the show so far.
Per Variety, Kaling’s new Netflix show is currently untitled. There also haven’t been any casting announcements, but we do know the basic plot synopsis. The series will reportedly follow a modern-day, first generation, Indian-American teenage girl as she navigates her life, presumably including things like family, school and dating.
Kaling previously opened up to Variety about how the new series came to be while promoting her most recent film, Late Night.
“Netflix approached me about doing a series on young Mindy,” she told the outlet. “I wasn’t as interested in telling a period piece about an Indian girl growing up in the ’80s, but I told them I’d love to do a show about a 15-year-old Indian girl now.”
This new Netflix series isn’t the first time Kaling has pulled from her own experiences for her work. She penned the script for and costars alongside Emma Thompson in Late Night, which follows Kaling’s character as she helps Thompson’s character maintain her spot on late-night TV. Kaling’s character is the only woman of color in the writers’ room, which is otherwise filled with mostly white men. This is something she says she experienced quite a bit in the early years of her career, though things are changing now.
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“There used to be a sense of obligation — of being shamed into having a token person of color to prove that you weren’t racist,” she told Variety, referring to when she first joined the writing staff on The Office. “Now people are realizing it’s actually valuable to have different perspectives. It’s actually a better way to make money and to reach more people.”
Kaling has also written two comedic memoirs that mine from her own life: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) and Why Not Me?. We can’t wait to learn more about her new, similarly personal Netflix series, which is sure to be hilarious.
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