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Never Have I Ever Netflix Series[2020]: A skimpy and cliched teen drama with few familiar band-aids slapped to make it work

“Never Have I Ever” – Though the title suggests for a reckless and curious experience through the journey of this new Netflix series, it is something what looks like when the iconic Mean Girls, in Tina Fey’s impeccable screenplay, is undone and falls short in putting it back. There are few segments called “Never Have I Ever” in The Ellen DeGeneres’ Show which are way funnier and entertaining than this show.

Never Have I Ever falls short as it tries to be intentionally hilarious when it needs not to. It dilutes the point of any remotely developed character in its process. Those attempts weakens the plot and delivers only the usual cliches to consume from the beginning. Those cloying plots make it difficult to form an emotional connection where it requires. Devi Vishwakumar, an Indian-American teenager in her sophomore year, tries to suppress her griefs of her father’s untimely death. She lingers in denial phase and sweeps her agonizing memories under a rug called Paxton, a bulky, handsome teenager with a swimmer’s body.

Devi is brainy like any Indian kid that’s been shown in American TV shows. But the stereotype is broken in certain places when it explores Devi’s need for affection, when she meet her therapist. She longs for love and acknowledgement from her strict mother even more after her father’s death as she didn’t have to ask for love when he was around. Though Devi is an Indian, she doesn’t feel like one. She grew up in that place and doesn’t feel like an outcast in this distant country. She feels right at home. While the other Indian characters in the show are being sketched with the actual stereotype that follows their nationality, like locking up their desires and emotions and not talk about them, Devi breaks that stereotype as she has born and brought up in Southern California. It is heartwarming to see that Devi’s friends, classmates and teachers who she sees everyday don’t ostracize her by her looks but it also raises a question that if they are all practising to be less observant of the diversity in nature. Well, Never Have I Ever is certainly not only about indifference but it makes a point about it when Paxton’s friend Trent learns he is a Japanese. Devi, being an Indian, doesn’t make any difference to the plot. It can be argued that that’s the whole point of it or what’s even the point of it. Nonetheless, the course of the story doesn’t make it any interesting as the approach to deal with the emotionally confused teenager is same old.

Devi’s trauma is reduced to just a few flashes of memories of a night without infusing any more dearth to it when it requires to. The course of the plot forgets to deal with her trauma, her psychosomatic paralysis, her therapy just like Devi forgets to confront the same. It ticks all the boxes for a coming of age teen drama and doesn’t try to be innovative. It is extremely casual when it needs to dwell more to it. I don’t mean to sound like the protagonist Devi’s stern mother here but Never Have I Ever stays safe and hide behind the cliches when it had the chance to be more than what it is. Unsurprisingly, It took an awful lot of detour to reach where we it did. A clever girl like Devi knows everything about life while knowing nothing about it. She gets what it means to be a gay when her friend comes out to her and unperplexed about it. And She doesn’t get that she can’t live her whole life running away from her fears and grievances. It is a moment of truth in everybody’s life. While Devi’s one-liners are smacking, it would have been great if her character is portrayed with some depth to dig into it. Even after confronting her fears, the fear of accepting her father’s death, there is nothing further more to look into Devi’s character as it is very limitedly arced, as nothing but a baffled teenager who replaces her setback with a boy’s company. she feels insecure about here appearance. The definition of being cool in her dictionary is living in a lie about her sleeping with the handsome guy in her school campus. Did she understand it’s all been a facade and it is not real at the end? We don’t know as it doesn’t feel like she has hit home in that one. It falls short in capturing her struggle of introspecting her. It goes without saying that Devi’s character finds parallel with the show’s creator Mindy Kaling’s life in, the land of dreams, America.

Her friends, her nemesis turned love interest, her crush, They don’t get their share of the chance to prove their excellence too. Just like how Devi thinks of only herself, the show makes it all about Devi too. The hilarity in an attempt to keep their lives together lacks its dearth when it makes it obvious. I would like to think, part of it is what it is because we don’t get the glimpse for who Devi really is before she was traumatized. That would have helped in the assessment to say if Devi really came around mentally to confront her fears and not just came around physically. That’s one of the things the could have been staged better. Never Have I Ever is ambitious when it works, like the scene when Devi’s mother immerse herself in an old memory of her bike ride with her husband by the side of Malibu beach, when they move into their new house in a suburban what looks like one of those houses from Desperate housewives show and when Devi conquers her fear by not fighting it but embracing it through her harp music.
Everybody, Devi see in her day, goes through some issues within them but the light is not shined well on their issues and has been kept there for the sake of it. It leaves few of its knots left untied, loosely fit and slapped a happy-ending band-aid to make this skimpy teen drama work.

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