Spoilers ahead for Never Have I Ever season 4.
In 2021, Never Have I Ever and Sex Lives of College Girls creator Mindy Kaling described a clear vision for the Indian girl she wanted to divine onto the screen, or at least a clear vision of the one that she didn’t: “I was the repressed Indian girl who hated my body and didn't feel worthy of sexual attention, and I'm not interested in showing that on TV,” she told Teen Vogue at the time.
She pointed to an ongoing conversation in the Never Have I Ever writers room. “There's this idea of how an Asian woman is supposed to be — demure, compliant, brilliant but not too talkative. I'm just not interested in that depiction.” Her list of nos doubled as a roadmap for where to take Devi Vishwakumar, the sincerely forward, obliviously selfish, work-in-progress protagonist of NHIE, not to mention the strong personalitied women in her family too. As Never Have I Ever season 4 hits Netflix, wrapping up the series that debuted in 2020, the show’s legacy is that diverse art is empathetic art — and there is nothing niche about its audience.
Never Have I Ever stands on tall shoulders in the conversation of representation, but it remains a watershed for the kind of story it was able to tell and the kind of audience it was able to reach. But it also marked a cultural difference in who brown people could be in this line of work. “Lang [Fisher] and Mindy [Kaling] encouraged us to bring our full selves to set,” Poorna Jagannathan, who plays Devi’s mom Nalini, tells Teen Vogue. “That’s the first time in my 18-year career that I’ve been asked to do that.”
For Jagannathan, who’s been a working actor long before conversations about diversity materially took hold in Hollywood, that made ending this show all the more emotional.
“We’ve grown so much of the conversation around representation and what it means to see a sliver of a reflection of you in it. You’re 27, I’m 50. I can say for me, it’s the first time,” she says. “Episode 10 was impossible to shoot.”
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, who was 17 when she first stepped onto set, experienced a different set of growing pains as she took to embodying Devi, growing pains that might be an indication that South Asians’ presence in Hollywood is reaching a maturation. As the world met her, she felt herself getting lost into Devi, and as a result, she grew resentful of her character.
“I wanted to do everything possible to get away from Devi,” she says. “‘Now I’m gonna wear all black all the time. That’s my brand.’ I really wanted to have that separation because I didn’t wanna give up Maitreyi. [During season 1,] when people would ask how I relate to Devi, I’d be like “Oh not really at all, we’re really different.’” But as Devi’s story progressed, Ramakrishnan was growing up too, and as she did, she understood it: “She’s not a bad kid. She’s just a kid.”
There are, however, a few ways Ramakrishnan is unmistakable from Devi. Where Devi deflects emotions with jokes, Ramakrishnan does it with coolness. On the topic of feeling sentimental at the end of the show, she almost shrugs it off. “Everyone was pretty emo. I was in my feels too,” she says, and then laughs at herself. “I cried. Who am I kidding? I totally cried. The moment I wrapped, I cried.”
The show’s first season premiered on Netflix in April 2020, in the first days of the pandemic, long before the term “COVID-19” had replaced “coronavirus” in popular lexicon. No one had a real idea as to when life after quarantine might resume, and on the whole, much of the entertainment industry had been put into a state of purgatory. Musicians were wishfully postponing their tours before ultimately being forced to cancel them altogether. Broadway had closed its productions. And for a brand new TV show with a breakout cast like Never Have I Ever, the crucial promotion cycle — press junkets, late night appearances, and red carpets — became a non-option.
But Never Have I Ever season 1 debuted with 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was at once an escapist family comedy where the only drama was interpersonal conflict, and a portrait of a grieving family. Jagannathan called the show’s debut a cushion landing in a time of mass unease and anxiety. “I’m a huge documentary viewer, and I love drama, and I couldn’t consume anything dramatic or anything close to realism because I was so anxious. I could only consume comedy,” she says.
The final episode of that debut season showed a blowout fight between Devi and her mom, whose big personalities and grief for Devi’s dad were coming to a head. “Because [the show] landed during the pandemic and because the end episode [of Season 1] was so intense, we were able to grieve with the episode, but we were also able to grieve for the time that we were in,” Jagannathan recalls. She calls the show a Trojan Horse for its disarming status as a comedy, followed by its keen ability to show real life as it happens to teenagers just as it happens to adults. “You don’t expect it to be this deep, profound anatomy of grief, and I think that’s kind of the genius of the show.”
The members of the cast, many of whom were newcomers to Hollywood, had taken their own savvy and created a promotion format of their own. From the safety of their homes, the show's stars spent that spring on social media asking viewers for their Netflix Party codes and randomly selecting chats to surprise fans. “I feel like the first season was a sort of birth, where we were in an egg waiting to get out of our shell,” says Jaren Lewison, who plays Devi’s rival-turned-love interest, Ben Gross.
The show began as a story about a 15-year-old girl who was starting high school and wanted to have sex and shake a reputation she was embarrassed by. Over the course of four years, the show built a castle on that foundation. Its comedy provided relief while strategically distracting the audience from the sudden and traumatic loss its characters were ignoring. The Vishwakumars were, in the wake of despair, not the gray-skied image of loss, but rather a colorful, dynamic portrait of carrying on without an instruction manual. While grieving their father and husband, Nalini and Devi attempted to lead lives unaffected by their tragedy, trying to govern their hurt to fit into the world as they previously knew it. In season 1, the grief was an invisible character in the scenes, and by season 4, Devi and Nalini learn how to recognize its presence and how it affects them. They learn how to rely on people, rather than conquer every circumstance. They learn that strength does not need to have an unphased look on its face.
It's through talking to Ben and her therapist that Devi learns how to put into words what her dad’s death did to her, words she puts into the essay that gets her off of Princeton’s waitlist. “It was how he lived that really shaped me,” Devi writes. “Princeton was actually a dream he and I came up with together. I think I’ve so fiercely held onto Princeton so that I could hold onto him. But if you don’t accept me, it’s okay because I can’t lose him.”
Over the course of four seasons, one of the show’s greatest triumphs was its ability to create an example reality of what traditional parents can be for teenagers. Ones who take steps to understand their kids. Ones who fiercely defend them through their messes. Ones who, in turn, continue learning about life themselves through the eyes of their children. Nalini learns how to be the parent who bails out Devi when she’s in trouble and to empathize with her through the messes she makes.
Jagannathan, a parent to a teenager herself, describes a shift that happens in parenthood when you start learning from your children. “The show creates so much empathy for this particular time for a young adult’s life,” she says. “Everything is life or death. Everything is extreme. They’re just looking to be accepted and loved and have a sense of belonging.” Devi was everyone’s biggest teacher, Jagannathan says.
The characters in Devi’s sphere go through transformations of adolescence of their own. Season 4 finds Ben, a practiced winner, suddenly out of his comfort zone amongst the nerds of Columbia; Paxton, always used to a warm welcome, unable to fit in at ASU and struggling to move on from high school; Eleanor, a lifelong performer, shrinking in the face of rejection; and Fabiola, conflict-averse and selfless, feeling guilty for stealing Devi’s dream school.
“I really loved where Fabiola’s storyline went in Season 4,” says Lee Rodriguez, who plays Fabiola. “She was on a roller coaster. Getting into Princeton, keeping secrets, wanting to go to Howard instead. I loved seeing where she ended up. It’s bittersweet to let go.” Meanwhile, Fab helped Rodriguez own the parts of herself that made her feel like an outsider. “She felt like she wasn’t really accepted into queer culture with her girlfriend at the time,” Rodriguez says. “I definitely sometimes feel like I’m not really in the know on queer culture. There are common interests that I never really got into. Fabiola in season 2 felt like she wasn’t really valid as a queer person because she didn’t have the right interests.”
As a rom-com, Never Have I Ever mastered the ship war: Paxton vs Ben. From season 1, boy-crazy Devi was not particularly great at having to choose. She’d be juggling throwing a party and inviting both of them in one season, and trying not to meddle while Ben dated other people in another. In the end though, it was always going to be Ben, her rival and her equal since day one. And their ambitions take them from Sherman Oaks to the tri-state area as they go to Columbia and Princeton.
“I’m biased, but I was like, yeah this makes sense. They find each other. No matter what is going on in their life, they always seem to be drawn back to each other,” Lewison says. He wasn’t convinced that it was always going to be Ben, but “Maitreyi and I just connected so quickly, and our friendship is so strong that it was easy for the writers to be able to create that as a storyline.”
In real life, Lewison does believe the show came into his and Ramakrishnan’s life by force of destiny. “[Maitreyi and I] both sort of felt like the show found us at the right time,” he says, “and almost like a nurturing parent, it sort of prepared us for [life after the show.]”
The show that premiered in the wake of a pandemic now bows out during the biggest labor movement Hollywood has seen in over a decade. The Writers’ Guild of America is on strike, with talks of an actor’s strike from SAG-AFTRA, to negotiate more equitable conditions with the rise of streaming. As part of the WGA strike, the show’s creators Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher have abstained from interviews and promotional appearances for the show, but the cast of Never Have I Ever knows that the show begins and ends with the work done by the people behind the camera. “When I think of Never Have I Ever, I don’t see a scene in the show. I see the set,” says Ramakrishnan. “I see the crew members. I see the writers at video village. I see everyone hustling and bustling. When I see Never Have I Ever, I don’t see the Sherman Oaks classroom, I see what’s slightly shifted to the side, which is a bunch of grip equipment and lighting equipment. To me that’s what the show is.”
Ramakrishnan, who was fresh out of high school when filming season 1, details a time she told the crew that her friends in Canada moved into dorms with roommates and went to parties and made new friends; Ramakrishnan, however, “met university friends who are old enough to be my parents.” “I was serious,” she says. “When I’m, one day, getting married, will I have a whole table of uni friends sitting there? Maybe not. But will I have those crew members? Oh hell yeah.”
Some of the crew members worked on the show for all four seasons, and in addition to coming to work, they watched the younger members of the cast grow up through four years of the biggest acting job they’d ever landed. Lewison, who had just started college at USC during season 1, thought of them during periods of self doubt.
“When there are low points as an actor, I’ll go back and watch an episode or think about a certain moment from the show or go on my camera roll and look at BTS or videos from set,” Lewison says. “And I say, ‘All these people believed in me and trusted me with something so precious and so special, even when I didn’t believe in myself.’”
Lewison calls himself “the question machine” on set, asking members of the crew endlessly about the minutiae of their jobs, from word choice in scenes to how shots were lit to how different makeup brushes functioned. “I was like a newborn child, and no one ever asked me to shut up,” he says with an air of gratitude and sincerity.
Related: The Desi Girl Era in Western Media Is Here At Last
Lewison took the last final exams of his college career during the first week that Season 4 began filming. In his eyes, his journey as Ben Gross bookends a formative portion of his youth. “I watch the pilot and I watch the finale, and I think of everything that I’ve gone through and everything that has happened to me from that first moment to that last moment,” he says. “This is one of the best adventure novels of my life.”
When I interviewed a 19-year-old Maitreyi Ramakrishnan for Teen Vogue’s August 2021 cover, she was eager to keep going, unwilling to let herself get comfortable with the show’s success. “There is my brain that said, 'You haven't done enough for 19. You need to do more,'” she said back then. “I always joke that I can count on one hand how many times I've genuinely been proud of myself and still have fingers left over. Which is a joke, but it's also true.”
Unprompted, she revisits this topic again when we speak ahead of season 4. That first time, the one she had previously mentioned, was in high school, when she wrote and directed a play and was cast in two roles, including Velma in her school’s production of Chicago. In 2023, she looks back on her work over the last four years. “I’m having one of those moments again right now.”
