Mindy Kaling - 'Running Point' & 'Not Suitable for Work' [LIVE]

24:06That's not advice that I would give my daughters or want them to hear. This is the hardest part of my career is wanting to give advice that's truthful, but then also reconciling it with the way that I got successful, right? I didn't lead with identity. I just wanted to be a good little worker and do that. And I did that for all eight years that I was at the office. And this is something that I'm still struggling with now.

24:26Mindy Kaling:There's no easy answer. When you were hired for the office, was it specifically as a writer or was it always with the understanding that you would also be on screen? Okay, so this is another, we talk about the big moments in my career. This was the other thing, which is like I said, when I was hired at the office as a writer, I was happy doing that. Like that was, of course, there was a part of me that said, like looking at John Krasinski, and BJ, who was a writer-performer, and thinking like, oh, that would be cool. I was hired as a writer, but there was a clause in my contract that I could be used as a performer.

25:02But honestly, I didn't even know about that clause, and my agent at the time didn't tell me about it. But the great thing about the show, The Office, was that, and this wouldn't have happened again if I had been hired on any of the other shows that I had mentioned, was that because it was a mockumentary and it was based on the, of course, iconic and incredible British office, everyone needed to look very normal. And I was like, I definitely look normal. Like that was, I, and so Greg wanted to, and it was like, I think we were working in the first season and it was the second episode and we had written, my friend BJ had written this episode called Diversity Day where Michael had to be offending people and it just wasn't as funny if the room was white you know it needed to be that there were some minorities in there who were like very offended and in that instance Greg was like well could you just be on camera and be one of the people in the office and if it had been any other show I don't know that NBC would have approved it but on this show where like everyone was like you know we look like people you might actually know they were like, yeah, she can do it.

26:10And so I got Taft Hartley and I got to be Kelly in that second episode.

26:14Mindy Kaling:I never knew that that's how it began. That's amazing. Yeah. And just for anyone who has been living under a rock for the last 20 years, Kelly, perky, talkative, pop culture obsessed, customer service person at Dunder Mifflin. You had never acted on camera before that. No, and my only role had been playing Ben Affleck. Yeah, right. So I couldn't believe it. I was so thrilled. But I'll also say, and I don't think Greg would be offended by this, it's like we had so many daily battles. I mean, I don't think anyone probably remembers this, but this is another good thing that happened at the very beginning of my career, and you'll remember this, is that the first season of The Office was like savaged critically, and nobody watched it, right?

26:59So to have that happen very early in my career, in addition to not being cast in my own show, playing Mindy Kaling, were two of the best things that happened. Because since then, I've had some successes, and I'm very proud of them and feel very lucky. But I've had a lot of failures, too. But being on The Office and seeing the trajectory of that, going from a show that usually, these days, you can't be a critical failure and have nobody watch it and come back for a second season. That doesn't happen anymore. But because it was, I think, pretty inexpensive. and back then it was just a bad pilot season and they're like okay give them a second season and so that has really helped me I think get over various failures or initial bumps in the road for my various shows because I'm like it's possible I've seen it and I'll just

27:48Mindy Kaling:note on sort of the parallel track I guess I assume emerging from your beginnings on The Office you were also around that same time I'm Richard Lewis's assistant in an episode of Curb. Yes. You were the ex of Paul Rudd's character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, obviously starring Steve Carell. I guess, were you now having a different sense of yourself that I actually, you know, I'm not just the writer, I am an actor as well? It was both Alison Jones who cast me in both of those roles. That was all in like the first and second year. But the thing is, and this gives you a good, maybe a window into my personality, or maybe you can relate to this.

28:26I got the role in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I got the role in 40-Year-Old Virgin, and they were both very small roles, but the people that I was surrounded with were all getting, like, Steve Carell got 40-Year-Old Virgin, right, so he was the lead of that, and I was, again, had a small part in, like, something that he was the star of, so it felt like, okay, yeah, this is just what I do, right, is I could do this, and all the other, everybody else in the cast, like, Jenna Fisher had been cast in Blades of Glory, so people were doing it on, like, a much bigger scale, and I always felt like I wasn't doing enough.

28:58I wasn't getting enough auditions. I wasn't out there. And, you know, to this day, I've probably auditioned for less than 10 things. Everything I've ever done has been something that I've written myself. I don't even know what that's like with my agents at CIA to have them. I'd love to do an audition. I'd love to get called by a director to tape something for them. Yeah.

29:17Mindy Kaling:Interesting. Well, you were kind of, when people would interview you or ask you about your on-screen work, which was, by the way, done on top of, again, writing, as I said in the intro, more episodes than anybody else. And just, you had a heavy plate. But you would kind of poo-poo questions about Kelly's character development or things. Here's a quote that you said. Quote, unlike Jim and Pam, who are growing and having children and becoming adults, Kelly's more like a Simpsons character in that she resets herself every time you turn on the show, which I think is good. Not everyone can grow and mature and become interesting adults.

29:54Mindy Kaling:It's good to have a 10 year old woman who acts like a 14 year old I Think that's really true And I mean the honest truth is and I love a show like The Office becoming so popular That it then makes it seem that like all the decisions were Purposeful and really thought out but the truth is that when you do a network show and you're doing 22 24 episodes It's just like we just got to get something to air right like we got to lock it and air it and that's one of those things where like Kelly was a side character and there's you know 21 and a half minutes to do an episode of TV we ain't gonna see more than a couple lines of Kelly per week and I knew that as a character and it was knowing that as a writer and then later as a producer that made me be like okay I like this character and it's been so fun playing her but I want more.

30:42I knew after season three like we're not gonna be doing storylines about her and that's okay. I don't know that there's a character that's more memed than her. It's like Michael Scott and Kelly, this day is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S. I have a lot of questions. How dare you? I hate a worm and now I'm going to look amazing. I love that.

31:06Mindy Kaling:Since there were limitations on how much you would be writing for Kelly, was there another character who you particularly enjoyed writing for? Yes, and I think this might surprise people because I love romance and I love writing about romance. I think a lot of people assumed that I mostly wrote like the Jim and Pam romance. And I, of course, loved that. But I often found that was like, Greg really understood how to do that romance with like a light touch. Because the show to this day, I think the thing I love about The Office most is it's legitimately so funny and packed with jokes. But it would have, and it's a very small percentage, like 4 % of the episode would be like a true poignancy or romance.

31:47right and now of course the the percentages have completely swapped right so mostly shows are like poignancy and by the way I'm not complaining I'm just saying that's the way it is and these are beautiful and great shows but it's more serious and then there's like only a couple jokes so I always like loved that structure and I think that when you're a woman a young woman particularly young woman of color in that environment you need to prove that you can write jokes right because the assumption is that you write story and you write romance and things like that. But at the office, I was like, I am going to be a goddamn joke writer, and I'm going to impress BJ Novak, I'm going to impress Mike Schur, I'm going to impress Greg and Paul Lieberstein.

32:28And so for me, I always wanted to write hard jokes, and so Dwight Schutt was my favorite character to write for. And weirdly, Dwight was a real fan favorite for my mom. My late mother was obsessed with Dwight. She liked how straightforward he was. He was a man of principle, and she never liked Jim. She never liked how Jim was always looking at the camera and smirking, but he was like, Dwight knows what he wants, he stands up for what he believes in, and he knows how to follow orders. And I was like, okay, I don't know that following orders has always been famously a great quality for people, but she really liked that, and I think she really liked that I liked writing for Dwight.

33:12Mindy Kaling:BJ, who again, I, you know, was one of a select number of people who were fellow writers and actors on the show. Here was what he thought was one of your biggest contributions to the show. An example of what, you know, this will lead into it, but that you essentially came up with Michael having a man crush on Ryan. And quote, that was one of the first impacts she made on the show. I to embracing odd lifelike changes. Mindy had a very big role in sort of delightful tangents." Close quote. Does that ring true to you as well? I do remember thinking it would be very funny if Michael had, like, you know, we saw that Dwight looked up to Michael and we didn't totally understand why, but it was so useful in the show.

33:59And I thought it would be so fun to have someone that he was like, oh man, that guy's so cool. Like a younger generation that just seemed cool and together. And I also played off of BJ's energy, which was sort of like aloof. And that ended up being a source of a lot of comedy. I'd actually forgotten that until you reminded me. The other dynamic that I may say that I really liked was Ellie Kemper, who's one of my dear friends, came onto the show. And she was so additive to it. And she was so funny. The writers loved writing for her. And I loved just hanging out with her. But one of the dynamics that we liked is when Holly, who Amy Ryan, the amazing Amy Ryan, came into the show.

34:39She's so likable and sweet and pretty and everyone liked her. And I remember being like, I think that Aaron should not like her and be suspicious of her and think that Michael could do better. And you're like, Michael can't do better. But it was just nice to fill that world with people who just thought Michael was good or special in some way. It gave the show like a nice like it not everything was so flat and black and white but yeah i i i didn't know that about about

35:06Mindy Kaling:ryan and michael theirs was a very funny dynamic so in 2011 i believe your first book came out and you said i'm going to give you another quote because i thought this was really interesting this is terrifying by the way because sometimes you know it is gotta do 60 minutes now that's no i love it but sometimes when you i don't know if you guys feel this way sometimes you just be talking, right? Like, don't you just like take on, not that I'm like a fan of Donald Trump, but sometimes I just feel like when he's just rambling, I'm like, yeah, I've done that. Do you know what I mean? You like adopt a, you just adopt an opinion, and you're like, ah, I'm gonna go with this.

35:45And that's what this is like, is you're like, you said in your book in 2011, I'm like,

35:49Mindy Kaling:oh God, what even did I say? Well, what's nice is that on The Office, if you did a really good job. Hey, cut this Donald, take out the part where I said I love Donald Trump. in your podcast, like, can you just edit it? Where I was like, as someone who loves Donald Trump, I find that we have so much in common. Why would I say that? Okay, we're in Newport Beach. I don't know, maybe that's liked here. You're playing on the crowd. Or it's divided. Who knows? All right, so, quote, what's nice is that on The Office, if you did a really good job writing an episode or you did a bad job, the show kind of absorbed the praise or the criticism.

36:35Mindy Kaling:The book was the first time where it was like, if it does well, I get to take the credit, but if it does badly, it's all on me. But that gave me a lot of confidence to write the pilot of what became a mini project. Take us just back into that moment where you're deciding, I think, eight seasons into the nine of The Office that you're going to step away from that and also start towards the Mindy Project, which initially I think was being cultivated for NBC as well. But also I think what, you know, if you don't mind me bringing up, that was a tough moment in your life, in your real life. Yes, yeah.

37:18Mindy Kaling:And it seems like it might have also fed into what you were wanting to do next. Yeah, so that period of time had more highs and lows, I think, than almost any other period of my life. But it was season seven, I think, of The Office. And I don't know how many people here know how a show works where you have a call sheet with a list of the actors. And they're literally, I mean, it's kind of nice how hierarchical it is, because you have the list of who is important and in what order. Every single day, you're given a call sheet, and Steve Carell is number one on the call sheet. And you go down and it just is this descending list of importance.

38:00And Kelly Kapoor was number 11 on the call sheet. And so I always knew I was like the 11th most important cast member on the show. And I remember after season seven or eight thinking like, you know, what would it be like to be number one? You know, I have given my entire youth to the show. I've written so many episodes. I've been a good little soldier for NBC. and I told my manager who's also one of the EPs on the show Howard Klein like could I could I write something for myself ask them and hear what they what they think and they said sure write a script we'll we'll pay you to write a script for the for your own show and do that and you alluded to this at the same time my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer stage four and as a doctor she knew immediately what that meant and anyone here who's who's actually dealt with any kind of stage four cancer this in particular 12 years ago it's like you you you're having life expectancy of like about less than a year so we all knew that and greg gave me i was still writing episodes and you know my value for him was to like write episodes because as you said i wrote a lot and so he let me move back to Boston and I would go with, they would send me outlines and I would just write scripts and send them back in and I could be with her during the end of her life.

39:21And it was also the time when I was writing drafts of my own show. And so it was one of the strangest days of my life to this day is when Kevin Riley called me to tell me that my show got picked up was the day my mother passed away. And he called me when I was at the hospital. and so that was like it was such a gift for anyone who's had anyone in their immediate family pass away the gift was not just professional but to be able to think about something else you know to be able to be like okay help my dad with all the stuff that you have to do after someone passes away but then also be able to be like okay I gotta hire a cinematographer and who's a director who could do this and so I truly to this day I think that was like a gift from my mom helped me through that time because we were so close that was like again and then that show in and of itself you said it was supposed to be for NBC I wrote the show to because I had only ever worked I you know I was this person who believed at the time that you you stay with one company for as long as you possibly can and what a company right NBC gave me all the shows that I mentioned that I'd watched and Saturday Night Live and I was like I want to be like Tina and Amy I just want to like stay here and have my own show as they did on NBC.

40:38And I did the pilot for them. This had happened before, and they were like, they're like, no, we're not interested. And at that time, my manager, Howard, was like, this isn't over, we're going to take it to Fox. And he had a great relationship with Kevin Riley, who had actually been the man who greenlit The Office. And he knew what I was able to do because he had such close connections with The Office. And this doesn't happen anymore, I don't think, either and I do believe and I'm not very woo woo but I do believe this was my mom was that he then said even though it's been rejected by my competition right he didn't think it had like the stink of failure on it and he said let's try and he let me shoot the pilot and then he picked it up to series and so it's like the thank you but again it goes to this thing of like part of me doesn't even like sharing this stuff because I just want people to think that I've just had a really easy, blessed time of my whole career and that I just appeared out of nowhere and got everything I wanted.

41:38But it is what I said earlier, it is not a linear path. And there have been times when I'm like, oh, all is gone. I'm not I'm not literally not playing Mindy Kaling on a show that I created. My show got is not getting picked up at NBC. And but there's been an enormous amount of luck.

41:55Mindy Kaling:I don't think it's a coincidence that Dr. Mindy Lahiri was in OBGYN, right? That was a nice tribute to your mom. You've also said, and I'm sorry, I won't keep doing these quotes, but this one is, it's an important one. Quote, the Mindy Project was a reaction against the way that someone who looked like me would have been portrayed in a normal romantic comedy, close quote. Romantic comedy, you could be the, you could teach a course on romantic comedy. That's your genre, right? You really know it. So when you say this show was meant as a reaction to it, in what way do you mean? Well, now this is not the case at all, what life is like now.

42:36And watching TV shows now, you have like Survival of the Thickest and Appet Elementary and so many shows, incredible shows that show all kinds of different people, young women in the workplace finding love. At that time, 2011, I think it was a little bit different. It was novel to have a woman who, and I've lost a lot of weight since then, but at that time was like a size 10, 12, dark-skinned Indian woman as a lead in a romantic comedy show. But it's funny because my taste, if you'd asked before I got hired in the office of what my favorite things were, were like Bridget Jones' Diary, Sex in the City, Girlfriends, these kinds of shows that are like about women with disposable income, with amazing outfits, like dating in an amazing city.

43:26And then I had to write for Dwight Schrute for eight years and a show that took place in Scranton, Pennsylvania. To this day, I think, again, that was learning that training of writing something that you don't want to write, that's not the thing that you think you'd be good at, is an incredible training tool. I think a lot of times now we tell young writers, like, write what you know for sure, but it's good to get good at stuff that isn't in your, you know, not everything has to be like a story about like your inner hurt and your problems. It's good to be able to, you know, stand in the shoes of a character like Dwight Root and Michael Scott and learn how to write for them.

44:02I think that's why I've been able to create a lot of shows that are not about an Indian 46-year-old woman, you know? So I went into that show with sort of the skills I had learned from the office But I got to finally do the thing I want to do which is romantic comedy And I got to do the other thing I wanted to do which is have more than two lines An episode of a show

44:21Mindy Kaling:Well, I think you said that you in the pilot of the Mindy Project had more lines than you had on the entirety of the office Yeah, that's true That's amazing Okay, so you're acting as the lead of a show for the first time You've also got every responsibility there is behind the scene on this one, obviously. Was there anything that had come from your experience at the office, anything that you had particularly seen from Greg or others that was helpful in grappling with the unknown? Anyone in that position, it might be overwhelming, daunting, whatever, but clearly you acclimated very well. It was very well-received.

45:03Mindy Kaling:So what was the secret to hitting the ground running? Well, thank you for saying that it was very well received, because I think it was pretty well received, right? It did get canceled after three seasons, and we went to Hulu and did another three seasons. So that, again, was a roller coaster. But I learned, I mean, everything I learned from that show, and honestly, what I've implemented to my subsequent shows has been from The Office. And it's been fun, because the subject material is so different, but the basic tenets of how the show is run is completely from my time there, which is I love jokes.

45:38Even if they're romantic shows or, you know, if you look at Sex Lives of College Girls or The Mindy Project, like the characters could not be more different than The Office, but the amount of jokes per page, big personalities, flawed leads, you know, people coming in, think they know exactly what they want, and the audience is like, I don't think you want that, and you hope that they learn that they should abandon that. And so those were all things like Mindy Leary is very different than Michael Scott. But in terms of coming in as big comedy characters with bad opinions and bad ideas and an inflated sense of self, they are similar.

46:11And in terms of how I packed the writers room, I took like excellent joke writers. You know, Matt Warburton, who's the showrunner. He was from The Simpsons and we had writers from Community and 30 Rock. So that was the tone was I wanted really funny people. And then there is poignancy. There is romance. There is parts when my characters, you know, and I tried to do this in every episode where there's a moment where the character, as outlandish as she is, has a moment where she says to someone, I'm worried. I'm scared that this isn't going to work out for me. And if it doesn't, what does that say about me?

46:47I find that to be really important, even for the biggest, funniest comedy characters, that we get to see them have that moment where they're like, you know, what if the world sees me and I'm this vulnerable? like what will happen to me? Will anyone love me? You know, those are, um, those, that's extremely important in my kind of storytelling.

47:06Mindy Kaling:You have been active over the years on Twitter, now X, whatever. You see the cultural conversations that happen around all kinds of shows when it's your show and everyone has an opinion and it's sometimes not even the opinion or the assessment is not even about what it is, but what it's not that somebody wants it to be. Do you like to see that? Do you prefer to block it out? Like, how much do you let the outside chatter affect you? I go through different phases. I think, unfortunately, I am like addicted to feedback, and I really want to know what people think. I think in particular, being an Indian woman, and doing a show that for instance, starred me or starred, my community is so starved for any kind of representation, there's a lot of pressure on that.

47:57If you show a certain kind of Indian person and they have different traditions than the kind of Indian person that those people knew and grew up with, that feels disappointing. So I've had to deal with that for 20 years of my career, and I can't say that it's easy, but I will say that that same group of people who really scrutinizing me the most are also the ones that ride for me the most. So getting it right, particularly for the people in my community is the is a thing that's it is really important to me but I get mad at them like I feel like they're my family where I get pissed at them too and I wish they had some sense of or more of a sense of what it's taken to make it this far without people really understanding like where I've come from I do think there's some things that I have been scrutinized with that my my fellow creators of shows don't don't necessarily

48:50Mindy Kaling:have to have to deal with no question in the years since the mini project you have been all over the place some projects that were originated by others and i'll just mention a few and obviously inside out an oscar-winning animated film where you play discuss you know and bring your i'm curious how you know if somebody hires you i assume they want the full mindy which would you know maybe almost like punch up or bring your own things to was that is something like that you show up and you're sticking to the script or are you also weighing in about you know the humor of the character well with inside out i remember pete doctor who who directed that or wrote that i'm sorry it was one of the strangest and most wonderful jobs because he just wanted me to act in it and most of the time the kind of jobs that i get are things were like hey can you like rewrite the script and then do a role in it.

49:45So it's an enormous assignment. And I think that they asked me my opinions on the script, but it was Jonas Rivera and Pete Docter. They wanted my opinions, which I thought was such a nice compliment from them. But I thought that script, and I'm so proud of that movie, really didn't need a lot of input from me. I thought it was incredibly funny and moving. Yeah, like that or Ocean's 8, that's the dream. I was going to say, yeah. Just to step into a role that someone else has written and just to be able to, I don't get those opportunities that often and it's really wonderful.

50:18Mindy Kaling:Was that also a wrinkle in time similar? Yes, in a wrinkle in time. Because that's your, in 2018, Wrinkle in Time, Ocean's 8, these big, you know, large scale movies. No, I worked with every famous woman in Hollywood in that one year. It was Oprah Winfrey, Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Rihanna, like it was all that one year and I really did love it because I'd just come off of doing 117 episodes on the Mindy Project where I'd started and had to write it and edit it every single moment, cast it, everything else. And so to just be on like Oprah's jet going to New Zealand to play like a witch in Ava DuVernay's movie, I was like, this is the life.

50:55Like, I love that.

50:56Mindy Kaling:And yet you don't take too long away from putting, you know, taking on big assignments because right after that, the next year was where you wrote, but didn't direct a film late night and appeared in it but uh which i imagine drew upon your own experiences in in tv but you have your your other show champions also in 2018 like it was there's no like year off at any point my my daughter was born in december of 2017 and so it was um but honestly like what's nice about when you're pregnant and you're very pregnant is that like people kind of leave you alone a little bit. So I was like writing and doing all that.

51:39And I was so lucky. I had a great pregnancy for all three of my kids. And I was just able to write right up until the end. The last time it was even better because I was in bed rest for like six weeks before my third one was born. So it's like my dream. I just had to like lay in my bed all day and write and watch TV. It was great.

51:59Mindy Kaling:I think you're among your most recent shows right up and including your most recent, you've kind of group them as a trilogy. And I'm talking about Never Have I Ever, which you did for Netflix. I'm talking also about Sex Lives with College Girls. Yes. And now Not Suitable. Were you embarrassed saying the title? Were you embarrassed to say The Sex Lives with College Girls? No, no, no. I kind of seen that you were like... No, I didn't want to get it wrong. A lot of my male friends are like, that other show, The College Girls one. So that would have been completely within your right. I want to say the secret line.

52:36Mindy Kaling:You didn't want to seem like a pervert. No, no, no, no. By saying the title, which is hard. No, that's fine. No, no, no. So, but those three. Yeah. I guess the common thread in large part is that you're drawing upon aspects of your own past, different chapters, but also not necessarily feeling obligated to be front and center on camera as well. Is that because you kind of prefer to do less of that? on-camera side of things? Or is it, like, how has it worked out that way? No, you know, the ideas came first, and I think, thank you for acknowledging, I've been trying to get out that there's this trilogy, because I think it's like, kind of seems smart and pretentious.

53:18No, but it is, I mean, it is like this, it's, I think I'm like Peter Jackson, but I, and Frances Porta Coppola. No, I, I, you're, the Never Have I Ever is a show about a 15-year-old Indian American Girl, Netflix and my friend Bella Bajaria picked that show up off of reading my book and hearing about me talk about my teenage years back when you could pick up a show to series based on someone liking her book. And the experience of doing that show with Netflix was such a joy. I loved it. And what I loved and it was really fun was doing, I'd worked with so many famous actors, you know, Steve Carell and Emma Thompson and all these people.

53:59And like I said, Rihanna, my dear friend Oprah. And then to do a show with all pretty much either emerging talent or fairly unknown actors was incredibly gratifying. And I love that. After I did that, I had another amazing experience with Sex Less with College Girls at HBO Max with Casey Boyes. Yeah. And then finally, I wanted to do a show about what it was like moving to New York. And that's the show that just came out this past week on Hulu.

54:27Mindy Kaling:And being, I think one of the things you've said is that the decade in which your career really exploded, you were in your 30s by that point. And that, weirdly, is less clear in your memory than other decades? From the start of the Mindy Project, I was so consumed by it and was working on it. Going to set at 6 a.m., rapping at 10 p.m., coming home. I don't have a lot of... I'll see memes or photos and it'll jog memories that I've completely forgotten. The time in my life that's most vivid, and I don't know if this is how you guys feel, is when I was not successful but just had big dreams. And I had no access to anything and I would go to bed every night worried that I was never going to happen.

55:12And I just, I don't know if you can relate to this, I wanted to fast forward to now, the time in my life when I was successful and everyone thought I was like cool and smart and had something to say. And I would go to bed at night in Brooklyn in our railroad apartment thinking like, is this ever going to happen? Why is life so slow? And I wanted to do a show about that time. I think I see a lot of shows on TV about 20 somethings that are slackers and they're sort of lying all over each other and they don't have a lot of career ambitions. That is not the case for the Gen Z people I know that work on my shows.

55:48I think there's this characterization that there's a generation of like screenagers who just want to cancel people online and not go to work. And I have not found that to be the case. And so I wanted to do a show about that. That's great.

56:05Mindy Kaling:And off to an amazing start. Thank you. Number one on Hulu. Yeah, not bad. Thank you. So the homestretch here, I want to devote to a show that we first talked about on this stage a year ago because an honoree was Kate Hudson for Running Point. And that is now two seasons in at this point. And this was a co-creation of you and three others, including Sal Saperstein himself, Baron Holtz. And I wonder if you can just share, like, were you somebody who knew or cared a lot about the Lakers, basketball in general, any of this? Or was this something that kind of came unexpectedly even for you? I'm so glad you brought this up because I was in the writer's room for the Running Point season three.

56:52Running Point is a show that stars Kate Hudson, who's playing a character very loosely based on Jeannie Buss, who is like one of the great Angelenos of all time. And we get to do the show at Netflix, which has been a dream experience. I said I started my my time with Never Have I Ever. And this has been a completely different show, but like even more enjoyable in some ways. And a lot of it is because of Kate Hudson. who is, again, that person that, like, we're exactly the same age, and she has been working. The time that I told you where I was like, when is my life going to start? Like, she was doing it.

57:28Like, she was in Almost Famous getting nominated for Oscars when I was living in Brooklyn and working as a babysitter. One of the luckiest things about that is being able to work with her, who is, for someone who loves romantic comedy, I mean, Kate is the queen of it. She's so iconic. But, yes, about basketball. So when my parents immigrated here, my dad was very much like, we are Americans now. Like, of course, culturally, we eat Indian food and I'm a Hindu and all that. But like, he's like, we live in Boston and I'm going to get into sports here. So he got really into the Pats. He got really into the Celtics and he got really into the Sox.

58:05But the one that he loved the most was the Celtics and the one that we talked about the most in our house. So we're always hearing about Larry Bird, Hondo Havlicek, Jojo White, Kevin McHale. and he hated the Lakers. He hated them. And as anyone from Boston is self-respecting Bostonian would, which is that they were all so good looking and they had so much money and the culture of movie stars and everything and we were the scrappy Celtics where everyone was kind of ugly but we had a lot of heart. You know, that was the feeling. Danny Ainge is good looking. There are some good looking Celtics. Why would I say that the Celtics are ugly?

58:42We'll put that with Trump. I'm just going to get a lot of, I don't need like, you know, Kevin McHale's family being like, how dare you? He's incredibly handsome, Mindy. But so I grew up loving basketball. And when I moved to LA, I obviously like knew of the greatness of Shaq and Kobe, but it wasn't until Jeannie, she was a big fan of The Office and The Mindy Project. And she said, listen, I've had a lot of people tell the story of the Lakers, and I am a peripheral character, and I would like someone to tell the story. But also, she has such no ego. She loves comedy. Her husband is Jay Moore. She loves comedy, and she says, I don't need to be the hero.

59:25I don't need to be perfect. And so we're like, you know, when Ike, Dave, and I heard that, we were like, wonderful. So she has been an incredible collaborator. her and Linda Rambis have been incredible collaborators on that show and Kate really is like she is the ultimate comedy star she's like Carell where the two of them they can be serious and do romantic stuff but she can walk into a glass wall she regularly trips and falls downstairs

59:53Mindy Kaling:I think you liked her Keanu Reeves impersonation yeah we made her do a Keanu Reeves impersonation for the finale and she's like got it you know just game for honestly everything and she's so glamorous and beautiful that's been unbelievably fun and this year both of those shows shoot at almost exactly the same time nsfw and we have it set up now where my two writers rooms are on the same floor of a building in downtown la and we um so i can go back and forth from the two of them which is great with season one that we talked about a year ago was kind of setting up the whole world obviously. Season two, it's kind of amazing how many of the things that have happened on the show have sort of, I have to assume coincidentally happened in the real world.

1:00:43Mindy Kaling:You know, sibling ownership bickering, selling the team, things like that. In your mind, can you just kind of talk, compare and contrast the experiences of season one and season two? The great thing about Jeannie's life is that the craziest shit is happening to her all the time. Yes, always. I mean, like, when we, when she first met with me, I then read her book and then read Phil Jackson's book to get a real idea of Showtime and what that world is like. And, I mean, it doesn't get more dramatic than being, like, the daughter of the sort of overlooked daughter in this family and then being told you're running the team and you have to fire your brothers.

1:01:23And she has the most amazing stories, you know, to be the only female owner at that time of how other older owners would treat her, rumors about her and players and just dating the coach. I mean, there's so much there. But I'll say that we did not purposefully do storylines that were pulled from the headlines just because of the turnaround at Netflix. But we were delighted by how much... I feel like the great thing about doing a show loosely based on the Lakers is so much dramatic stuff is happening to them. Like they signed Luca and we wrote a storyline about signing a new, a new player. And so it, it feels like we're doing it on purpose, but we're not.

1:02:04And it feels like anytime they have a big storyline, it feels in some ways like synergistically, like making people excited to watch our show. And what you,

1:02:12Mindy Kaling:you're not, as you say, obviously putting it to, to real world events deliberately. But I mean, is the, the way kind of happens is that you've described it as you try to write yourselves into a corner essentially like yes and then you just have to figure out a way out yeah like netflix has a lot of shows in development and they want to hit and they want a lot of people to watch their shows right it's like a business and so at the end of every season we try to and by the way they taught us this because you know they're rooting for us as well they want the show to go on but like they're like try to make as many cliffhangers you know when you're watching a netflix show and it's coming to an end and some crazy shit happens and you're like well now i have to watch the next one that's on purpose and it's it's like a sales tool to keep you hooked in and so we have done that but by the way we learned that on never have i ever back when we started doing that like we're like oh we can't just tie everything up neatly at the end of the episode they'll like switch channels they'll be on like hbo max in two seconds so we are like we gotta like hook them in with like a crazy cliffhanger at the end of an episode and that's very different than working on the office right which is so episodic and you have 20 episodes and you have an episode called Cafe Disco, which is just a random episode in the middle of a season that doesn't relate to the rest of the season.

1:03:28Mindy Kaling:Well, last question for me is, I know you're a person who has kept lists that you shared in books and things of different, you seem very analytical, so I've got to ask you, we've talked about all the unbelievable stuff that you've packed into 22 years of a career so far. What's on the to-do list still? what's left that you haven't. I thought you were going to ask me what shows am I watching and I was going to be like off campus. Off campus. Yes. Heated Rivalry. Yes. I never knew how much I liked hockey until this past year and a half. I will say like these shows, these like steamy shows are a real, you know, for someone like me who's always writing about horny characters who want to do whatever, you know, they're always talking the talk but there's virtually no sex in any of my shows, right?

1:04:16And then for me, you grew up in the 80s and 90s, and you're watching these huge hits that are just so sexy. If you watch the Sex Lives with College Girls, they're always talking about it, but no one ever wants to have sex with them. And then to see this, I mean, it's like I feel alive. I'm watching off campus, and I'm like, bring me back to Dartmouth, please.

1:04:36Mindy Kaling:Maybe that's the answer, though. Maybe that's the next show. A really raunchy, you know. I have done a lot of horny 20-something shows, I think, for my lifetime and maybe other people's lifetimes. But it is energizing to watch a show that is just so full of desires. I don't know if that's for me to write, but I certainly do like watching them. There you go. Well, thank you for all the great entertainment over the years. Thank you for being here. Mindy Kalin. Thank you.

1:05:31Mindy Kaling:We announce upcoming guests and provide details about special live recordings of the podcast that you can attend. Until next time, thanks again for tuning in.