Dear Television is Jane HuLili 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 2 by Jane Hu

A feature of television that plays with pre-established tropes is how play opens space for surprise. As Kaling writes in a piece for The New Yorker: “I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world.” New Girl toys with quirky dream girls, while Mindy Project announces from its first scene its debt to romantic comedies. Quite literally: the opening shot zooms away from an initial frame that exactly borders a television screen playing When Harry Met Sally, which then pans away to young Mindy’s face. For that first moment, we might even be seeing the film as screened in a theatre — but no, it’s playing on TV. And therein lies the difference. If one premise of Mindy Project is what happens to the rom-com movie when transferred to the medium of television — with all its attendant sit-com formulas — then I am more than game.

Read the rest at LARB’s television page.