Dear Television is Jane Hu, Lili Loofbourow, and Phillip Maciak. We will be writing epistolary criticism about TV. If Clarissa Harlowe were writing about Girls — and she kind of is, isn’t she? — this is what that would be like. Abridged. This season, we’ll be corresponding about FOX's New Girl and The Mindy Project from our new home at the LARB. Join us!

‘New Girl’ and 'The Mindy Project’; Week 1, Post 1 by Phillip Maciak

Why we should be talking about these two shows together at all? First, there’s the fact that FOX has explicitly paired the two as a kind of kooky-ladies-looking-for-love block on Tuesday nights. Then, there’s the idea that these are two shows about strong single women who love their jobs written by two strong women who love their jobs. There’s the idea that Mindy Kaling might could be a younger, Indian-American Tina Fey for FOX. Then, there’s the question of how major networks are trying to distill and re-bottle the success of HBO’s Girls in prime time. And there’s race, and there’s the auteur theory, and there’s the ascendance of the FOX network as Quirk Central, but I want to focus our attention this week on something more generic that both these shows share.

Both New Girl and The Mindy Project are generational comedies. Specifically, they are generational comedies about single, early thirtysomethings living in coastal cities. Last night, we had on-the-fly references to crypto-Christian hard rock band Creed, Spike Lee’s He Got Game soundtrack, Shawshank, food blogging, ironic(?) hipster racism, OKCupid, slap bracelets, AutoCorrect sexting SNAFU’s, compulsive brunching, artisanal Old-Fashioneds, Occupy fatigue, fake vegetarianism, Springsteen v. Mellencamp, Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks as the archetypal couple, and not one but two a cappella performances of Deee-Lite’s “Groove is in the Heart.” 

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

[Screencap credit: grande-caps]