Do we like Mindy Kaling?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record on both tests, plus loud support for trans people and a real gift to her old college, with only a thin record on some topics.
Mindy Kaling is a TV lifer. She says she's been working in television for about 20 years and started most of her shows. As a kid she watched sitcoms with her family and decided early on that it was the job for her. In her words: “From the earliest age, I thought, I want to do that.”
The freshest news is a flop, not a scandal. Not Suitable for Work, a Friends-style comedy about 20-somethings in Manhattan and her first sole creator credit since The Mindy Project, launched in June. Variety's critic wasn't impressed, though she saw glimmers of something sharper. Hulu has passed on a second season, and Warner Bros. TV is shopping it elsewhere.
Her best-known fight was about credit, not conduct. In 2019 she said the Television Academy told her it would cut her from The Office's producing credits, and that she alone had to write an essay defending her work. The academy said 41 producers across several shows had to justify their credits, regretted that she felt singled out, and said it didn't think she was. She hit back on Twitter, saying the statement “doesn't make any sense”.
On the harm test, we found nothing from her. When Josie Totah came out as a transgender woman in 2018, Kaling tweeted that she was glad Totah could “live as your authentic self”, and that she couldn't wait to write for her again. We found no anti-trans, anti-vax or climate-denial words or acts from her, and her recent work is her own shows and projects. That's a clean sheet on what we could find, not a full audit of her feed.
Politically she's on the record. She spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, joking about being known for “outing” Kamala Harris as Indian. She said both their mothers were immigrants who devoted their lives to serving others. Whether you cheer or shrug depends on your politics, but it's a pro-immigrant message from her own mouth.
The good stuff is real money and real thanks. She paid for the Mindy Kaling Theater Lab at Dartmouth's Hopkins Center for the Arts, which opened in October 2025. She called it “a big investment” and “my expressed gratitude in a real physical way”. She said she hoped it would be “a place that's filled with laughter”.