I almost thought this would be the episode where things turned a corner. It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Mindy, and a lot of critics seem to be writing off the show completely, but what with all this talk of cast shakeups and retooling, I still think there’s time to turn things around. Maybe. “Two To One” doesn’t start badly at all—I laughed at a bunch of dumb jokes, like Mindy getting pissed at the hospital night cleaner for bitching about her cat peeing in her husband’s shoes. “Okay, Doris, we get it. You’re married.”
Then came the slightly unexpected, but welcome twist—Stephen Tobolowsky’s Dr. Shulman has retired, so I guess the show really wasted a bunch of paychecks having him in their credits even though he only appeared in one episode past the pilot (seriously, just one). It’s especially funny since they went to the trouble of reshooting the pilot with Tobolowsky after he replaced Richard Schiff, but I think it was more the role, less the actor, that was the problem. Shulman didn’t have any weird quirk or twist to him—he was just going to sit around flabbergasted as his young partners bickered at each other, and that wouldn’t be fun for anyone. So, goodbye, Tobolowsky! May your character-actor skills be better employed somewhere else!
With Shulman gone, there’s even more bickering that rushes in to fill the void. Jeremy, Danny, and Mindy all have plans for Shulman’s office and for the future of the firm and a pattern quickly develops—Danny makes all the decisions, Jeremy votes with him because he hates making decisions, and Mindy gets ignored. This immediately seemed reductive and petty to the extreme. Yes, of course, we’re constantly reminded that Danny doesn’t respect Mindy (although secretly maybe he kinda does).
So maybe I can buy him making a unilateral decision about taxicab ads or something, but his whole attitude of completely marginalizing Mindy and encouraging her to take the day off and go get drinks with her friends seemed a bit much. It almost seemed like he was behaving ridiculously just to prove a dumb story point… oh wait, that’s exactly what was happening. This is a frequent problem for The Mindy Project: It’s having trouble nailing its characters down because they act so wildly inappropriately all the time. If Danny wasn’t a complete gigantic jerk, then how could Mindy stand up to him and assert her independence? With better-drawn characters, things don’t need to be so over-the-top, but The Mindy Project has had some trouble in that department.