Is It Maybe Time For The Mindy Project To Kill Off Danny?

Remember when it was fun to watch Mindy Lahiri and Danny Castellano? She was a flighty idiot and he was a crotchety churl, but somehow they made us believe that they liked each other, that each made up for the other's deficiencies. Seeing them figure out how to be in love with each other was both believable and enjoyable. Then they had a baby, and got engaged, and it started to seem like we were seeing them figure out how to escape each other -- we got half a season in which Mindy and Danny were hardly ever in the same time zone, and then briefly engaging but mostly ignoring their very real differences as parents whenever they did manage to end up in the same room. Exactly how rough things were getting wasn't clear until a midseason finale that made it clear exactly how far back Danny and Mindy's fundamental differences actually went. It was a bold episode that dared to suggest what romantic comedies pretty much never can: that some couples can't be together, and shouldn't try. The midseason premiere confirmed what we all assumed was about to happen: Danny and Mindy broke up, and we've had half a season's worth of watching them try to negotiate co-parenthood and build separate lives for themselves. But after this week's episode, I am pretty sure there's only one direction things can go from here.

I am not a crackpot. I just think The Mindy Project needs to kill off Danny.

It's such a drag to say this, because I used to like Danny so much. I too locate myself closer to the "grumpy old man" end of the spectrum than a youngish person probably should. Like Danny, I am generally certain there's a right way to do things and it's however I do them. Mindy's a dingbat most of the time, and what's Danny going to do -- not tell her?

But the character of Danny has been curdling for a while -- all the way back to Season 3, even, when he stubbornly put his principled stance against marriage ahead of his child's mother's wish to solidify their relationship as a legally recognized family. The way he came around on that one, with a climactic Season 3 finale race through the streets to find her parents in India and tell them he was in love with their daughter, was emotionally effective and actually moving...but doesn't it feel like that was the last time Danny backed down on anything?!

As a betrothed couple, Mindy and Danny kept clashing over how their marriage was going to work -- generally because he wanted Mindy, an OB/GYN who'd just established a fertility practice, to give up her career to be a stay-at-home mother. Then he just fucked off for a bunch of episodes to spend time with his ailing father, which sounds noble until you remember he was leaving his fiancée with a newborn baby and no help. Then he came home to tell her everything she'd been doing wrong -- like he'd always done, but now his critiques had a new edge. It was one thing for Danny to make Mindy think she wasn't good enough for him when they were just two single people who happened to work together. Now every spat they'd ever have was going, in some way, to relate to if not outright be about the child they'd had together.

It's been a few episodes since we last saw Danny, during which time Mindy and Jody have kissed. Morgan remembers Danny's prohibition against Jody's dating Mindy, but he supports the union, so he and Jeremy head down to Danny's new office to try to get him to back down in his anti-Jody hostility -- a position that seems even less tenable once they meet Jeremy's nurse/girlfriend, Sarah. Who by the way is not even the same girlfriend Mindy met at Danny's apartment weeks ago when she was dropping off Leo so WHATEVER, DANNY, MIND YOUR OWN PEEN AND QUIT WORRYING ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE'S.

But there's more: Sarah follows Jeremy and Morgan to the train and tells them she's looked Mindy up online and is horribly intimidated by what she perceives as Mindy's glamour and style. (Morgan and Jeremy can't bear to tell her that Mindy's tweeting extremely personal relationship advice to Lady Gaga does not actually mean they're friends.) She wants to meet Mindy in person to assure herself that she doesn't really loom as large for Danny as she does in Sarah's imagination, and Morgan brings her in as a prospective patient at Mindy's fertility practice. Sarah is dazzled by Mindy: "I love your outfit. It's so sexy but also classy. You look like Taraji Henson at a small claims court." She leads Mindy into a conversation about Mindy's ex -- whose penis Mindy says she draws sometimes just to calm herself down -- that ends in her breaking character and angrily sputtering, "THAT'S NOT YOUR PENIS TO DRAW ANYMORE." Mindy cheerfully agrees that Sarah's right, and Sarah leaves feeling much more secure about her own standing with Danny -- which is good, since as she mentions on her way out, she and Danny aren't just dating; they're engaged.

I am not a parent of any kind, never mind a single parent trying to gracefully manage my relationship with my child's other parent as we each pursue separate romantic paths. But getting serious enough to MARRY SOMEONE who's therefore also going to become one of your child's parents and never even introduced her to your ex? SEEMS SHADY. Presumably if Danny's getting ready to marry Sarah, she and Leo have spent time together, and if the Teen Mom franchise has taught me anything, it's that decent single parents are very careful about making that introduction and including their exes in the process. And Danny is not a backwoods twentysomething who got pregnant (the first time) as a teenager; he's an adult man in his forties who should have some innate sense of decency and comportment. The gingerbread house maker of yore would, one imagines, have handled these matters with more delicacy.

Under any other circumstances, a show like this could lift out a Danny so easily. It could give him a new job overseas -- hell, even another borough would get him out of the orbit of the rest of the characters and off the show forever. But someone thought Season 3 would be better if Danny and Mindy had a child together, which means in Season 4 AND FOREVER AFTER, this fucker's going to be around, sourly sneering at his old friends and colleagues and opining about Bruce Springsteen. Every time he comes back, it'll be a reminder not only that things between him and Mindy didn't work out, but that a lovable character once wore his face, many moons ago.

So since moving Danny away from his son can't be done without damaging Danny's character even worse than it already has been, killing him off is the only solution. And honestly, I'm not sure it wouldn't actually be good for the show.

Let's say Sarah and Danny get married, and the show does another time jump. Now two years have passed: Leo's getting ready to enter preschool, and Danny's hurrying to walk him there for his first day when BAM, he gets run over by a truck. But now Leo's gotten used to his new mommy Sarah -- someone who admires and respects Mindy a lot more than Danny does and has actually become her friend. Mindy knows Leo loves Sarah and has no desire to wrest him away from her. So The Mindy Project enters a new era as it shows how Danny's most significant exes form a new family for the son he's left behind. Maybe Mindy and Sarah have become such good friends that Sarah moves in with Mindy and they start having all kinds of new single gal adventures, as Leo stays mostly in the background. Having already made the rare choice of portraying a breakup as healthy, The Mindy Project can forge ahead and portray a different kind of family, which--

Wait. That's just Playing House. Well, if Danny were dead, The Mindy Project could be more like Playing House -- something all sitcoms, frankly, should aspire to, instead of trotting Danny out over and over to remind us that things between him and Mindy didn't work out, but dangle the possibility that they still could when NO ONE WANTS THEM BACK TOGETHER ANYMORE. And if Danny were dead, maybe Morgan would finally feel there were no remaining impediment to dating Mindy himself...

...AND I'M SICK OF WAITING FOR THESE TWO TO HOOK IT UP ALREADY. I am not a crackpot.