I was late to The Mindy Project, a Fox series that moved to Hulu in later seasons. It’s the story of Dr. Mindy Lahiri, an NYC OB-GYN on the prowl for true love, played by Mindy Kaling. Once I started watching though, I couldn’t stop. Even now I stream the show in the background, mostly when I am working on medical notes at night. Dr. Mindy and I have one big thing in common—we are both doctors. Dr. Mindy is the flawed but self-assured boy-crazy pop-culture-obsessed Missoni-clad main character.
Mindy’s daily life is easy to slip into. It’s my world. I had struggled with the decision in medical school—should I become an OB-GYN, bringing babies into the world? But while I could handle on-call 36-hour shifts when I was 24, that was not how I wanted the rest of my life to go. I can vouch that Mindy’s arguments with her partners about time for relationships are authentic. Maternal mental health—reproductive psychiatry was a much saner choice for me.
Dr. Mindy Lahiri is a second-generation Indian-American woman. Mindy mocks racist stereotypes. Kaling had been asked—insultingly—where her confidence came from. Dr. Mindy’s personal taste in men was even disparaged—and not that she was shitting where she ate by dating the other doctors at work. The show was criticized by the Media Action Network for Asian-Americans, because her character Mindy seemed to only date white men. Her Indian-American character wasn’t allowed to have her own sexual preferences and agency? Yes, there were a lot of hook-ups; Mindy had 21 suitors over the course of six seasons. But there are a lot of couplings in medicine. Many doctor-friends of mine have married other doctor-friends. (And so did I.) In fact, so many of the couples we knew were doctor-doctor couples that my young daughter thought everyone had to be a doctor when they grew up.
I will admit Mindy is hard to stream in the background. The jokes come so fast—especially Nurse Morgan’s one-liners—that sometimes I need to pause to laugh and rewind.
For the 104 episodes before “Mindy Lahiri Is a White Man”, Mindy is established as a strong independent doctor who just happens to be a single mom. “…White Man” comes late in Season 5, just after some other mind-bending episodes. With only a dozen episodes after it, many shows would have been jumping the shark. As the episode starts loading, I realize that we are nearing the end of the run. And I’m already thinking about what show I will stream-binge next in the background.
Earlier that evening, I’d streamed the preceding episodes— “Hot Mess Time Machine”, where Mindy is stuck in a time loop, reliving her own Groundhog Day until she breaks the cycle by making things right with her then-boyfriend, Nurse Ben. And the doppelganger episode where a heartbroken Dr. Jody Kimble-Kinney dated Mindy’s uncanny valley act-alike-look-alike Claire (played by Tiya Sircar who would later steal the scene in The Good Place).
But here came the perfect episode to completely steal my focus. “…White Man” stars blonde hunk Ryan Hansen as Dr. Mindy Lahiri— or Dr. Michael Lancaster. Mindy has Freaky Friday-ed her way into Ryan Hansen’s body, being a hot white male OB-GYN for the day. So within a few episodes, both Sircar and Hansen got the fabulous opportunity to act as alternate-Mindies.
The set-up for the episode is that Mindy was interviewed (by a group of white men) for a top-doc position at her hospital. She got asked how she’d balance being a mom with a stressful job, and whether she could keep her emotions in check in stressful situations— questions many women in medicine know all too well. Dr. Jody, her male competition for the position, told Mindy, “I’m sure they’ll pick the right fella” for the job, and Mindy didn’t get called back for the second round of interviews. She went to bed lamenting “I wish I was a white male.”
When Mindy wakes up the next day, she is instead Michael, who—of course— made it to the second round of interviews. I can only imagine how much fun it would have been for Hansen to play Mindy, the Indian female sexed-up doctor, who is enjoying waking up looking like Ryan Hansen. Though, for me, Ryan Hansen forever recalls his role as Dick Casablancas (Jr), the villain-bro tormenting the titular girl-detective in Veronica Mars. (Senior preferred the moniker ‘big Dick’, but Junior wasn’t far behind.) Dr. Mindy doesn’t become Dick, but a boring middle-aged version of Hansen, who we see with all the privilege his special white male status affords compared to Mindy.
What makes “…White Man” really stand out is specifically what the Freaky Friday angle shows us— by demonstrating the trappings of privilege better than all the musings in the world could. Mindy’s jokes become hilarious coming out of Michael’s mouth, he hails cabs for fun—because he can, manspreads on the train, and jacks off quickly. Not to mention that he can get dressed in 3 minutes flat. But the real differences come at work, when patients follow his recommendations unquestioned. In Michael’s second-round interview, he certainly doesn’t need to talk about his qualifications, his single parenting, or why he’d be an effective leader. Rather, he is told that the men can “tell a good leader just by looking at you.” Boom.
Watching the scenes unfold is powerful—so much more powerful than just counting the number of white men who get promotions before equally qualified women or people of colour in an HR video. While Freaky Friday-type stories are usually just for fun, this switcheroo used satire to make strong points about intersectionality, gender, and race—without ever being preachy.
The only thing that could’ve made the perfect episode more perfect would’ve been if Dick Casablancas—I mean Dr. Michael Lancaster—would’ve had a run-in with Mindy’s overbearing ex-mother-in-law, Carla from Cheers—I mean Annette Castellano.
Susan Hatters Friedman is a psychiatrist who specializes in maternal mental health, and a lover of pop culture. Her writing can be read in X-R-A-Y Literary, Hobart, and Mystery Tribune.
