The following piece contains spoilers about season one of Never Have I Ever.
The breakout first season of Never Have I Ever ends on a literal cliff-hanger: a climactic kiss between former frenemies Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Ben Gross (Jaren Lewison) as they sit in a parked car overlooking the California coast. The Netflix comedy, cocreated by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher, was conceived and produced long before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the entertainment industry. But its road forward is directly affected by the global health crisis—and leaves even the idea of two teenagers swapping spit on potentially precarious footing.
“We’re definitely thinking about all possibilities, because, I mean, there’s so many hypotheticals. It’s like, how do you ask people to kiss each other [on a set]?” Fisher told Vanity Fair in a recent interview. “How do you have a hundred extras in a high school setting? Will there be rules where you can link to production, but they can only be scenes of two people?”
Released by Netflix on April 27, Never Have I Ever has been one of the streaming platform’s biggest successes this spring. During its debut weekend, the series ranked first in territories around the world, including the U.S., according to Netflix’s own publicly released data—ahead of not just Hollywood, but also the Chris Hemsworth action film Extraction (which Netflix claimed was on pace to hit 90 million households within its first four weeks of release). As a result, it seems likely the show will be renewed for a second season; the Devi–Ben kiss and how it affects her budding relationship with the more traditionally hunky Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet), is but one of the dangling plot threads left up in the air. But thus far, Netflix has not confirmed Never Have I Ever season two.
“I think we have to wait to see if they actually renew us, but also what will the rules be and how long will it be before we can actually do a production,” Fisher said of continuing the show in a future where the coronavirus will likely change the fundamental nature of film and television production. “And so I think some of those rules will probably dictate story lines if they’re really restrictive. But I mean, we’ve certainly been thinking a lot about what some of these limitations might do in terms of what season two’s story arcs would be.”
As Hollywood grapples with eventually going back to work, writers have been debating how they may factor the coronavirus pandemic into shows based in a recognizable reality, like the sunny high school setting of Never Have I Ever. As an unnamed writer told Vanity Fair in April, “If you don’t address [the pandemic] even in a light way, you have your head in a cloud.”
Fisher acknowledged that struggle, but admitted she didn’t want to paint herself into any corners about how the show might discuss the pandemic.
“I think it would be pretty hard to completely ignore it,” she said. “The style of the show is pretty current, with a lot of current references, and what’s going on in the world is what they talk about. So I think, whether or not it happens in lockdown versus happening on the other side of it is another question. I think a lot of that just really depends on when we’re actually allowed to have a production, and where we are as a society when that happens.”
A longtime writer on The Mindy Project, Fisher said Kaling approached her to collaborate on Never Have I Ever in part because of her deep love of teen shows like My So-Called Life and Dawson’s Creek. Working together, the pair created a series that has not only been praised for its depiction of the immigrant experience (Devi is a first-generation Indian American), but for its authentic portrayal of teen life.