The moment feels startlingly, painfully familiar. In the fourth episode of the new season of Never Have I Ever, our charmingly hotheaded protagonist Devi is stopped in her tracks when she is faced by a horrifying sight: another Indian girl has arrived at her school. Worse yet, she looks pretty and cool. We see in Devi’s eyes, a complicated look: one of threatened panic, rooted in a sense of mutual identification.
The girl is a transfer student named Aneesa, a major new character in Mindy Kaling's Netflix comedy, which was wildly popular in its first season for its depiction of Indian-American adolescence that felt genuinely new in a way that also avoided being cloying, as has become the increasingly common pitfall for shows that overdo their purportedly groundbreaking perspectives. Part of this balance was achieved by the development of a much deeper, rather moving narrative — the undercurrent of grief that Devi (a delightfully precocious Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) was fighting in the wake of her father’s death — amid the high school dramatics.
