Comedian, writer and TV star Mindy Kaling went from being a scene stealer in The Office to being the creator of some of the most celebrated comedies in television history.

She was born as Vera Chokalingam in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1979, the same year her family immigrated to the United States from India. Her family wanted her to have a cute American name so they began calling her Mindy after Pam Dawber’s character from the sitcom Mork and Mindy. She first began entering the comedy world when she went to college, attending Dartmouth in New Hampshire and writing for the humor magazine the Dartmouth Jack-o-Lantern, in addition to joining improv comedy troupe the Dog Day Players (a group whose alumni includes film directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller). She graduated in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in playwriting.

In the early 2000s, Mindy Chokalingam became an intern on the NBC talk show Late Night with Conan O’Brien and she also started performing stand-up comedy in New York, which is where she first devised the name “Mindy Kaling” because American emcees had trouble pronouncing her birth name. Kaling also had off-Broadway success in 2002 when she co-wrote a play with her college friend Brenda Withers called Matt & Ben, in which Kaling played Ben Affleck and Withers played Matt Damon. A surprise underground hit in New York that reimagined Affleck and Damon’s writing process for the movie Good Will Hunting, spawned from Kaling and Withers’ own inside joke where they mockingly pretended to be the two men in their personal lives for their own amusement.

When TV writer Greg Daniels was developing an American version of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office, he hired Kaling based on the strength of her spec script, which he liked for its originality. Kaling would end up joining the cast as the superficial customer service representative Kelly Kapoor. Kaling actually stated that the character of Kelly was based on the exaggerated version of herself that she believed upper-level writers thought she was like. Which is one way to spin what could be interpreted as a negative experience into comedy gold.

Kaling also appeared with her Office co-star Steve Carell when she made her film debut in Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), followed by appearances in the comedies Unaccompanied Minors (2006), License to Wed (2007), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), No Strings Attached (2011), The Five-Year Engagement (2012), This Is the End (2013) and The Night Before (2015). She also voiced animated characters in Illumination’s Despicable Me (2010), Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph (2012), DreamWorks Animation’s Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014) and Pixar’s Inside Out (2015) voicing the character of Disgust.

Her next TV series following The Office would feature Kaling in a lead role both behind the camera and in front when she created The Mindy Project, a sitcom that was originally pitched for NBC before NBC executives sold it to FOX, where it premiered in 2012 and ran for three seasons until 2015 before it moved to Hulu and ran for an additional three seasons from 2015 to 2017.

The Mindy Project starred Kaling as Mindy Lahiri, an obstetrician/gynecologist trying to balance work life with her personal and romantic life in New York City. The series featured a diverse cast of friends and co-workers played by Chris Messina, Ed Weeks, Ike Barinholtz, Beth Grant and Xosha Roquemore, although the main cast changed a lot over the course of the show’s six seasons. It got good reviews with praise aimed at Mindy Kaling’s unique personality, a charming cast of characters and very funny writing. I’m one of the show’s fans and I found it consistently witty from episode to episode, almost like an episodic rom-com.

The show hasn’t been completely immune from criticism. Some people found the cast and Mindy’s love interests to be heavily White-centric, which at best I always found odd (even though I have no idea what goes into the casting process). On the other hand people have also praised the show for not making Mindy’s race as a South Asian woman central to her character, appreciating how the series helped normalize Indian lead characters with multifaceted personalities in American TV shows.

Another show Kaling created was the NBC sitcom Champions, which is about a gym-owning bachelor played by Anders Holm living in Brooklyn with his brother (Andy Favreau) until his high school fling (Kaling) and their son (Josie Totah) come back into his life. The show was short-lived with NBC cancelling it after one ten-episode season in 2018. Kaling also co-developed Four Weddings and a Funeral, a miniseries adaptation of the 1994 rom-com by Richard Curtis centering on four American friends reuniting for a wedding reception in London. It starred Nathalie Emmanuel, Brandon Mychal Smith, Rebecca Rittenhouse and John Reynolds and aired on Hulu in 2019 to a mostly negative reception due to mediocre humor and clichéd writing.

Kaling starred in a few more movies when she was cast as Mrs. Who in Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time (2018) and as jewelry maker Amita in the heist comedy Ocean’s 8 (2018), followed by another heist comedy called Locked Down (2021). But she also worked behind the scenes as not only the star but as the producer and writer of the 2019 film Late Night directed by Nisha Ganatra and starring Emma Thompson as a television host who hires a new writer (Kaling). Many critics found it funny and smart when it premiered at Sundance before a limited theatrical release the following summer by Amazon Studios and its subsequent streaming release on Prime Video.

Kaling’s most successful series since The Mindy Project would be the Netflix comedy Never Have I Ever, which she co-created with Lang Fisher and ran for four seasons from 2020 to 2023. The series stars Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as a San Fernando Valley teenager coping with the sudden death of her father during her last three years of high school. The series received praise for being a watershed moment in South Asian representation for the way it resisted a lot of stereotypes while managing to be smart, funny, sweet and honest while doing a commendable job balancing comedy and drama, despite occasional criticism aimed at the show having to do with inaccurate cultural portrayals and possible stereotypes of Jewish people. Although one thing that’s for sure is that lead actor Ramakrishnan was a breakout star.

Also receiving praise was Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble’s college comedy The Sex Lives of College Girls which premiered on HBO Max in 2021 and stars Pauline Chalamet, Amrit Kaur, Reneé Rapp and Alyah Chanelle Scott as four freshmen living it up on campus. Critics found it warm-hearted and honest in its portrayal of 18-year-olds on the cusp of adulthood navigating their newfound independence.

In addition to the shows I’ve mentioned Kaling also appeared in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sesame Street, The Muppets, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Morning Show and she lent her voice to the Disney+ series Monsters At Work and to the character of Velma Dinkley in the Max series Velma, the largely derided adult animated comedy based on Scooby-Doo which premiered in 2023 and which Kaling also executive produced. Critics said the show was occasionally clever but mostly lacked fun and relied too heavily on cheap pop culture references and meta humor. Even the character of Velma herself received criticism for being like a more hateful version of Daria. I was one of the show’s harsh critics upon its premiere and I haven’t gone back since watching the pilot, but apparently someone is still watching it because it got a second season and hasn’t been cancelled yet.

Kaling has not only received praise for her large body of work but also accolades such as a Primetime Emmy Award for her writing on The Office as well as acknowledgement from the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild and even the Tony Awards for co-producing the Broadway run of the musical A Strange Loop. Not to overlook the fact that she is also just a plain funny performer, which is what made me a fan of hers in the first place.