Is The Mindy Project perfect? No way. Is it groundbreaking and worth checking out? Absolutely yes. For a show to be created, written, and starred in by a woman of colour in 2012 is breathtaking and to be celebrated. It's also funny, with great writing, and I grew to love many of the characters over the run of the show.
Scores and notes for:
The Mindy Project
Sex/Nudity: Plenty, but it's prime-time sex... you know, where women are always wearing a bra. Weird.
Passes Bechdel test: Just barely in the pilot. Mindy's fellow doctors at the practice are all male (at least in season 1), and because the whole show is a send-up and celebration of rom-coms, Mindy's conversation generally revolves around men.
HAES-friendly: Ugh... no, not in the least. Mindy's weight is often mentioned for laughs, somewhat oddly alongside the common refrain of how hot she is. (True, for the record). The costume designer on this show is a genius and many of the outfits Mindy wears sold out in stores the day after the show aired. Even worse, one of the main characters spends an entire season in a fat suit for reasons I still don't understand.
LGBT+ representation: Not great. It isn't until a later season that a regularly-occurring character is gay. Laverne Cox appears in a few episodes along the way.
Diversity: I have to give the show credit for a woman of colour as the central figure, but the rest of the cast is distressingly white. Making the choice for all the men Mindy dates to be white is better than making them all be Indian, but a little diversity would have been nice there. She seriously doesn't even ever consider dating someone black or Asian?
As of July 2019, this show is available on Netflix Canada.
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