Kaling, kid help make comedy a winner
Mindy Kaling has not left the building. In fact, she’s barely had time for a short walk in the fresh air between the end of “The Mindy Project” and the launch of “Champions,” a pretty irresistible comedy she created with Charlie Grandy, premiering on NBC on Thursday, March 8.
Kaling isn’t the central character in the show, but plays a pivotal role as Priya Patel, a former girlfriend of Vince (Anders Holm) who now owns a Brooklyn gym with his dimbulb jock brother, Matthew (Andy Favreau). One day, Priya shows up at the gym with a 15-year-old kid named Michael who needs a place to live in New York so he can attend a high school for would-be performers.
Michael: Meet your dad, Vince, who is secretly planning to sell the gym and relocate to
Florida and is overheard by Michael ranting about how inconvenient it is that his son just showed up.
Pay no attention to the well-worn setup. Kaling and co-creator Grandy use plot as a display case for consistently funny writing, sweet and credible performances by the ensemble cast and most of all, the exceptional skills of J.J. Totah, who plays Priya and Vince’s proudly out son, Michael. The writers give this kid dialogue that Bruce Vilanch could have written for Bette Midler, and Totah tosses it off with hilarious and lovable ease.
Yes, the show has a nice share of “oh, snap!” dialogue for Michael, such as taking one look at his style-challenged dad and announcing he looks like the abusive boyfriend in a Lifetime movie. But the genius of the script is that while Michael is outspoken and dramatic at times, it isn’t unrelenting. He’s also a nice kid, nervous about his new life and about having to audition to get into Manhattan Academy. In other words, he’s just a normal kid who has a tendency to reference scenes from “Les Miz” to explain his moods or situations as any particular time. He can’t resist telling Vince’s current girlfriend, Brittany (Mouzam Makkar), how fabulous she is when she stages an overdramatic hissy fit because Vince didn’t tell her he has a son.
Kaling and Grandy have also worked hard to make this an ensemble show, with a democratic distribution of laugh lines through the entire cast, which includes comic Fortune Feimster as Ruby and veteran character actor Robert Costanzo. They have also worked hard to avoid preaching, in spite of the fact that a gay teen is about to have two dads. But here’s a twist: Both of them are straight, and they’re brothers. What is this world coming to?
“Champions” is a winner.