THE MINDY PROJECT

Season 1 SABC3 (*193) 19:30 Episode 5 Danny and Mindy play a hilariously horrible game of Chicken when he volunteers to become her new gynae – and she plays along! Best of all? Mindy slowly giving up trying to pretend that she lives a healthy lifestyle. NB!

Season 1 SABC3 (*193) 19:30 Comedy

Mindy Kaling is doing triple duty on her sitcom The Mindy Project (2012-2017) – she is the lead star, creator and executive producer but it’s a labour of love, explains the 39-year-old: “The show is a defiantly old-fashioned series. That’s exactly what I wanted when I pitched – I want the girl to get the guy she was destined to be with. Will they live happily ever after? Well, I am the boss…”

Mindy jokes that she was born into 1

showbiz: “My name is from Mork & Mindy (1978-1982). It was the only US show my parents got while working in Nigeria when I was born. I told [show star] Robin Williams when I met him and he laughed in my face. It is totally true though.”

Her stage name isn’t made up – it’s 2

a shorter version of her birth name Vera Mindy Chokalingam. “I lost a few letters from my surname as it was impossible to pronounce while I was doing the stand-up circuit in LA,” she explains.

Juggling jobs isn’t new to Mindy, 3

who learnt the skill working with Steve Carell on The Office (2005-2013), where she was a writer and played Kelly Kapoor beside Steve’s neurotic Michael Scott.

She was hand-picked by Steve as 4

the series’ first female writer after he saw her improv show while studying playwriting at Dartmouth College.

The one thing Mindy’s kept secret 5

about her one-year-old daughter Katherine is the father’s identity. She didn’t even reveal her pregnancy – that was done accidentally by Oprah Winfrey, her co-star in Disney movie A Wrinkle In Time (2018). “What am I going to do? Give Oprah a telling off?” she says with a laugh.