![]() ![]() He’s a jock who doesn’t care about school, but, as played by Barnet, he has the subtle thoughtfulness of rom-com hunks from Jake Ryan to Gilbert Blythe to Jordan Catalano to Peter Kavinsky, and, like them, he’s observant and often kind. ![]() Paxton, like many classic rom-com dreamboats, has a soul behind his penetrating stare. Devi’s frequent comments on looks are meant to charm us, I think-as when she exclaims that a visitor to the house is “hot,” when she’d worried he’d be “an uggo.” The visitor politely thanks her, but some of us will cringe.Īnd yet this beauty fixation, in the form of Paxton-his meaningful glances, his meaningful hoisting himself out of a pool-sets in motion a kind of hero’s journey for Devi, to the benefit of characters and viewers alike. And both she and the series itself tend to fixate on hotness in a way that’s off-putting, suggesting that nerds of many ages simply can’t differentiate between beauty, desire, love, and connection. She’s feisty, which we like, and grieving, which we empathize with, but she’s also difficult. Just as McEnroe once screamed at umpires and threw tennis racquets, Devi blows up at her friends and relatives, and does things like smash her chemistry beaker when Ben gets a better grade. “Not to make this about me.” Devi and her two high-achieving best friends, the theatre nerd Eleanor (Ramona Young) and the robotics whiz Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez) are known, McEnroe explains, by “the lightly racist nickname the U.N., ” because they’re “an ethnically diverse group of academically focussed, um, I can’t think of a better word for dorks.” Devi is also a “hothead,” we’re told. ![]() “You might call them the John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors of Sherman Oaks High School,” McEnroe says. 1 since elementary school with her rival, Ben Gross (Jaren Lewison). (The wheelchair subplot is treated as a lightly embarrassing trauma, then abandoned.) Like many nerds, it leads with a bit of showing off: there’s a montage of Devi’s having competed for No. The series is itself like a socially awkward teen-age nerd-charming but maladroit, heedless, a little exhausting. (Cue the opening credits, to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.”) By the end of the first episode, Devi has introduced herself to Paxton and offered to have sex with him. She was cured from her paralysis by a glimpse of the school hottie, a swimmer named Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet), which inspired her to rise up and walk. Soon after, Devi’s legs stopped working, and she spent three months in a wheelchair. in September, 2001, McEnroe tells us: “Not a super chill time to be a brown person in America.” They were a happy family of three last year, while watching Devi’s harp solo at a school concert, Mohan had a heart attack and died. After a brief montage of McEnroe jumping around and hoisting trophies in a terry-cloth headband (“Wow, I look great there!”), he presses on with Devi’s backstory.ĭevi’s parents, Nalini (Poorna Jagannathan) and Mohan (Sendhil Ramamurthy), came to the U.S. One reason is evident immediately: it’s funny. “You may ask yourself, Why is sports icon John McEnroe narrating this tale?” John McEnroe asks, reasonably, in voice-over. It asserts itself with sassy confidence right away, not just in Devi’s voice but in the narrative’s framing. The series, like the drinking game with which it shares a title, is about innocence and experience-and about a teen-ager’s plucky, naïve desire for more. This voice-assured, breezy, somewhat self-aware aspirational hedonism, with a keen appreciation of stone-cold hotties-will be recognizable to fans of Mindy Kaling, the Nora Ephron-loving “Office” alum, memoirist, and longtime proponent of the rom-com, who co-created the semi-autobiographical “Never Have I Ever” with her “Mindy Project” colleague Lang Fisher. (This is startling-she looks more like a kid than an adult.) “He can be dumb-I don’t care. classes.” He should be “a stone-cold hottie who can rock me all night long,” she says. Last year “pretty much sucked,” she says, so this year she has some requests: she wants to be invited to a party where she has “the opportunity to say, ‘No cocaine for me, thanks’ ” thinner forearm hair and, most important, a boyfriend-“and not some nerd from one of my A.P. What’s poppin’?” She’s wearing a cute, casual outfit and is in a tidy middle-class bedroom. “It’s Devi V., your favorite Hindu girl in the San Fernando Valley. “Hey, gods,” she says, hands folded in prayer. As the new Netflix coming-of-age series “Never Have I Ever” begins, its fifteen-year-old heroine, Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), before heading off to her first day of sophomore year in high school, kneels in front of her household’s shrine. ![]()
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