Film

Mindy Kaling’s ‘Late Night’ Is The Workplace Comedy That Women Deserve

And it's not just because Emma Thompson gets to wear a series of immaculately tailored pantsuits.

by Kate Leaver  21 August 2019
Late Night Review Mindy Kaling

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Mindy Kaling wanted to watch a comedy about late night television, set in New York, starring Emma Thompson in a series of immaculately tailored pantsuits — so she wrote it. Late Night is Kaling’s first feature film.

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When she was writing it, Kaling wishfully cast Thompson as the cold, difficult protagonist. She sent the screenplay to Thompson’s agent and heard back within 48 hours.

Thompson, objectively a living legend, said she’d be thrilled to take part, thanks so much, but just how many tailored suits can she wear in one film?

Just How Late At Night Is It?

Late Night is set in some fabulous alternate universe where a woman has been the most famous late-night talk show host on television for decades.

Her name is Katherine Newbury and she’s an institution in the TV industry, yet when we meet her, the show’s ratings are at an all-time low. Executives are threatening to cancel her program, in which she likes to interview intelligent people and talk about meaningful social issues — unless she learns how to use Twitter and talk to YouTubers. She’s also chastised for not getting along with women, despite reluctantly being one.

In an attempt to revive her show and satisfy her diversity requirements, Katherine hires Molly Patel (played by Kaling), whose only comedy experience is telling one-liners at the factory in which she works.

Molly bakes adorable cupcakes and walks into an all-dude writers’ room to begin her new career. Katherine and Molly clash, Katherine and Molly bond, Katherine and Molly get to be nuanced characters with decent dialogue in this movie because a woman wrote it.

They get their very own character arcs and they have sensational hair. It really is the workplace comedy we deserve — thank you very much, Ms Kaling.

Mindy Kaling’s CV, Though

Speaking of workplace comedies, remember when Mindy Kaling was in the American version of The Office?

Yeah, she played Kelly Kapoor for seven years, from 2005 to 2012. She was also a writer, director and executive producer on the show, and she took home a few shiny trophies, including an Emmy, for her work.

Kaling has spoken about how she felt like she was the diversity hire for NBC back then, which of course turned out to be perfect training for her to later write a film about an Indian-American lady-woman, who gets hired to placate executives who’ve been told they need a little colour and femininity on the team.

She then went on to write and star in The Mindy Project, where she ran the show, perfectly setting her up to write from the perspective of an overbearing female boss. She started out her career in comedy as an intern on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, which rather pleasantly qualifies her to write about the power structure of a late night talk show on American television.

Look, what I’m trying to say is that Mindy Kaling has spent her entire career up until this point collecting the precise experiences she would need to write this very film. The fact that she knew to cast Emma Thompson in the lead role is frankly just further proof that this woman knows what she’s doing.

Let’s Have Some Professional Banter

Kaling’s decision to set this film in a place of work is genius, because it very quickly passes the Bechdel Test (the criteria of which is that women are seen to speak to women about topics other than men).

Katherine and Molly — Thompson and Kaling — barely speak about men.

They have a live television show to put on every night, a satirical monologue to pull off, and an obnoxious young male comic to vanquish before he takes over as talk show host. They have, that is to say, more important things to discuss than each other’s romantic prospects.

They each have love lives, but they’re neatly contained as sub-plots with side characters (until Katherine’s personal life threatens her professional popularity and becomes a rather major plot point).

John Lithgow plays Katherine’s husband, Walter, and he — like so many female love interests before him — basically only exists as the protagonist’s partner. He has very little purpose except to move along her emotional development as a character, and it’s frankly quite refreshing to see a man in that role. He is perfectly charming and in fact gives quite a moving performance, but he is still just a player in Katherine’s storyline, which makes for a nice change.

Molly, meanwhile, gets seduced by one of the writers on the show — but he is basically a fleeting, handsome distraction for a woman who gets more lines than he does. His jaw is chiseled but his presence on screen is actually minimal, which — again — is quite novel.

Ladies Go To Work, Too

It’s also just a really great choice of genre, you know?

As far as workplace comedies go, really we’ve got The Office, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Great News, Scrubs and Brooklyn 99. Some of the greatest comedy ever made, to be sure, to be sure, but not major Hollywood movies written by lady-folk.

In the spirit of Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope, it’s just a powerful delight to see women characters killing it in their places of work. It is a genuine pleasure, for 102 minutes, to imagine that a woman is the most successful late night talk show host on TV.

It’s equally pleasing to watch as a woman of colour proves everyone who dared to underestimate her wrong. It’s edifying, to see two women with huge careers in comedy, having spent most of our lives being fed the lie that only men can be funny. And it’s genuinely interesting to see both female leads wrestle with their personal and professional motives.

It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a jolly good one. More like this, please and thank you, Hollywood.

Kate Leaver is a journalist, speaker and author. Her first book is The Friendship Cure. She tweets @kateileaver, mostly about TV, dogs and Harry Styles.