In 30 Rock, Tina Fey transformed her experience of being the first female head writer on Saturday Night Live into delirious weekly crescendos; even at its nuttiest, the show contained glinting truths about the drubbings endured by women in that male environment. Mindy Kaling also bears behind-the-scenes battle scars: as an American woman of Indian descent, she was hired through a diversity writing programme to work on the US version of The Office before creating her own sitcom, The Mindy Project. She channels that background into her first screenplay, Late Night, which is essentially The Devil Wears Prada (scary boss, timid young upstart) in a chat-show setting. Though the film is about people striving for comic excellence, its own quality control hints that mediocre is good enough; it’s stuck between 30 Rock and a hard place.
Kaling plays Molly Patel, who benefits from the decision of the late-night talk-show host Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) to bring a woman into her all-male back-room team to help arrest a ratings decline. Katherine, who sports the platinum hair of Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV and is just as vicious, has been a star for decades, but is so distant she doesn’t even know her writers’ names. Molly suggests that what Katherine needs is to show more spirit and personality in her humour. The boss’s favour, though, brings its own problems. As one of the other writers grumbles: “I wish I was a woman of colour so I could just get any job I want with no qualifications.”
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