I've been patient with Mindy & Danny. But their relationship is all too happy. Every roadblock leads to a rainbow (and yeah, it's as cheesy watching it as it was to read that sentence). Suddenly, the series' goal seems more about making every week a happy ending instead of finding ways to make its audience giggle and guffaw. Even Morgan, who's been our comic relief in this romantic rainstorm, is becoming pretty (dare I say it) average. And to top it all off, the most exciting moment of Mindy's big move to Stanford on this week's Mindy Project was Danny getting a foot job from Mindy's professor's wife.
Unfortunately, not even that infallible Castellano charm could save the episode.
Sure, Mindy learned her lesson in the end, but she spent the majority of the episode using Danny's friendship with her professor to get ahead. She weaves a giant mess, part of which includes Danny's little foot action, and before long, she's asking her professor to stop giving her special treatment only to throw down the footjob bomb in order to get him to agree. Predictably, Prof is so upset he gets hit by a car — well, a security cart. He's fine, Mindy does the right thing, and she gets to bone Danny in front of her dorm poster of Taylor Swift (or Rosie the Riveter to people who've taken a history class).
Plots on this show have been messy before, so I guess my issue here isn't the lack of imagination, it's the lack of humor. The biggest recurring gag here was that Mindy, a grown ass woman with a badass fellowship at Stanford, can't tell the difference between Taylor Swift and an iconic figure in history. Sure it was cute when Reese Witherspoon did it in Legally Blonde (and Mindy seems to fancy herself the medical community's version of Elle Woods as evidenced by the flattery she feels when her prof makes a quip about the movie). It's not so cute here.
What made us fall in love with Mindy and The Mindy Project, despite all of its many plot issues and scatter-brained ways, was that Mindy was the person who was brave enough to say the things we wished we could say. She was brutally honest and selfish in a way we only think of being when no one is looking and the result was hilarity on a weekly basis.
Now, Mindy is just selfish and out-of-touch, she occasionally does the right thing, and she ends every episode making out with her boyfriend. And frankly, it's getting old.
Image: John P Fleenor/Fox
