One of director Kabir Akhtar’s first episodes on Mindy Kaling’s Netflix comedy series “Never Have I Ever” was the first episode told from Ben Gross’s (Jaren Lewison) point of view in Season 1.
The show follows Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) as she conquers the rollercoaster of high school, the emotions of adolescence and her particularly hot temper, which could flare at any moment. Devi also experiences a classic love triangle between two very different boys — Lewison’s overachieving, nerdy Ben Gross and Darren Barnet’s laid-back jock Paxton Hall-Yoshida.
“I ended up directing both Ben episodes and one of the Paxton episodes, and that first one, one of the things I loved most about it was — you look at it on the surface, and to that point in the show you have this young brown girl as the main character,” Akhtar told TheWrap. “This privileged white kid who’s sort of the main antagonist, and then to encounter a script where the job is to infuse that bad guy with empathy was a lot of fun to do because everybody’s going through stuff.”
Akhtar used certain techniques to highlight Ben’s loneliness, such as an emptier set and wider framing. He also directed Paxton’s breakout episode for Season 4.
“I just took an approach to film it a little differently. It still feels like the same show, but wider frames, emptier frames, poor Ben standing there in his giant awful house out in his front yard playing basketball with like nobody else anywhere nearby,” he said. “Likewise, in this Paxton episode, when you first meet him, he seems two-dimensional. He’s smoldering and silent, but when you peel back the layers and see the things that he’s struggling with, see what’s hard for him, in a lot of ways — like in real life — when you get to know someone better and get to understand them better, I think you wind up liking them more. It’s a really fun storytelling device to use in a television series.”
Akhtar couldn’t predict how the love triangle would resolve.
“From the beginning, I had no idea how it was gonna end. It’s funny because both Jaren and Darren were always saying to me, they’re like, ‘Come on. You’re my team, though. Right?’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Well, you know, I love you both equally.’ I didn’t have an idea of who I thought it was gonna be.”
Like stars Richa Moorjani and Poorna Jagannathan, the appreciation for the cultural steps “Never Have I Ever” has taken is not lost on Akhtar.
“When I started on the show, season one, it was what, three and a half or four years ago. At the time, it was almost unthinkable that a show was being made about a first-generation Indian American kid and Indian family in America, and not being about the Indianness of it,” Akhtar said. “And just to think about how groundbreaking it was, it’s sometimes hard to wrap my head around because there were no shows like that at all. Now the door is open for more. There’s more in the pipeline and there’s more representation for Desis on television and movies. I’m overjoyed to have been part of it and to have gotten to direct so much of it because I know that young me never saw anything like this on television.”
“It made a big difference to me that there weren’t shows like that, and I can only imagine that it’s making enormous differences now. Now it seems like we’ve moved the needle so far that it’s no longer just an option, it feels necessary and welcome and important. I think ‘Never Have I Ever’ for four years has been a tremendously fun show to watch, you know and with fun characters to root for or root against, but behind all of that, what the show has done to change the cultural conversation around South Asian representation makes it extremely important to me and, and I’m very proud to have been involved.”
