Hello everyone. It is I, your Feisty Indian Aunty, who just binged the second season of Never Have I Ever and enjoyed every episode tremendously even though I am in my 70s. I also had the pleasure of joining a video interview with the Star of the show Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. We had such a fun conversation and Maitreyi is such a beautiful, charismatic young lady. (Side note: I found Maitreyi to be an unusual name for a Sri Lankan Tamil, so I looked it up on Google and discovered that it meant “a well learned person.”)
The second season of Never Have I Ever deals with how Devi continues to manage the varied experiences she faces as an Indian teenager in America. Her mother, unable to cope in the United States, decides to go back to India to see if that would be a better fit. It was a pointless trip, and she returns instead with her mother-in- law who had no one to look after her in India.
As for Devi, she finds herself courted by two men – the brilliant Benjamin Gross (Jared Lewison) and the sexy hunk Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet). She is still unconsciously struggling with her father’s death and ends up coping by two-timing the boys with the help of her two best friends Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez) and Eleanor (Ramona Young). All of that, as you can probably imagine, goes a little sideways, with plenty of teenage angst and hijinks throughout the season.
What happens to Devi can happen to anyone. Coping with the death of a parent, or even a divorce, is hard for any young person. The anxieties can make a teenager react in ways that are not productive. There is no guidebook that gives a young person the ways and means to deal with grief, with self-esteem problems (Eleanor), with competition in school (Benjamin), with students who are more attractive and popular (Aneesa), with young people who have different sexual orientations (Fabiola), and a non-communicative but strict mother (Nalini).
This series talks about how parents can either make or break a child’s ambition. It was tragic to see a handsome young man like Paxton fail to see the need to study just because he was an athlete. Even when he lost his athletic prowess after an accident, his parents were not bothered about his future, and did not encourage him enough to make him study harder. It was Devi, and later Paxton’s grandfather, who would coax him to be better and do better.
And then there’s the new character, Aneesa, a beautiful sportswoman who, being a Muslim and from her very traditional family, was forced to engage in the things she loved in secret. Her love of sports. Her relationships. So much so that when her pristine image is tarnished, all her mother thinks to do is run from one school to another.
Never Have I Ever deals so well with the many issues and problems faced by young teenagers who are often running blind with their emotions, their abilities, and their path to achieving their dreams. The parents here are as lost as these children and lack the ability to guide any of them. Yes, this is a sitcom. Yes, it is very funny. But these are also very real situations that extend beyond merely a laugh or two.
To that end, Never Have I Ever is a series that cunningly balances it’s humour and its message. Being young isn’t easy. Grown ups don’t always have all the answers. So all you can do is just ride it out and have as much fun as possible. At least until you become one of those grown ups without any answers.
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