Never Have I Ever Season 2 explores a painfully familiar experience for young people of color

Mic

"The moment feels startlingly, painfully familiar. In the fourth episode of the new season of Never Have I Ever, our charmingly hotheaded protagonist Devi is stopped in her tracks when she is faced by a horrifying sight: another Indian girl has arrived at her school. Worse yet, she looks pretty and cool," says Brandon Yu of the addition of Megan Suri as Aneesa, adding: "We see in Devi’s eyes, a complicated look: one of threatened panic, rooted in a sense of mutual identification...The tension Devi immediately feels is a reflection of a very specific phenomenon that is common to most people of color who have been surrounded by people that don’t look like you — the feeling of entering a classroom, or any room, in which there is just one or two 'others' like you. The energy — an unusual mixture of wariness, of hostility, but also perhaps of comfort and warmth — that links you can be immediately palpable, even if others might not notice. In this case, others certainly do...It’s a funny joke that also distills a viscerally uncomfortable truth. Within this brief moment of sizing-up the one other Indian girl, there is a maelstrom of conflicting implications and emotions, from resentful admiration to a confusion of the innate racial dynamics of high school’s social hierarchies. How is it that this girl can bulldoze through the school upon arrival, piercing through the ceiling of popularity as an Indian girl, while Devi has rather faithfully accepted and cultivated her role as an archetypal high-achiever? Aneesa, Devi seems to think, isn't sticking to the script."

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• Never Have I Ever stars found the overwhelmingly positive response to Season 1 both moving and shocking: “I don’t think any of us knew that it was going to take off in such a big way,” says Richa Moorjani, who plays Devi’s cousin, Kamala, in the series. “First of all with stories like these we never get to tell them or make it past the written pilot stage let alone getting picked up straight to series.” Poorna Jagannathan, who plays Nalini, adds: “We’ve been talking about representation for a long time. This show is radically diverse and radically authentic yet radically universal. When you imagine something and it comes into being, it’s much more joyful and amazing and beautiful then you ever thought it could be. And it gives us all so much purpose.”
• John McEnroe admits narrating Never Have I Ever is "fatiguing mentally": "The first year, it was at recording studios in New York and L.A.," he says of working as narrator. "This season, it was all Zoom. It’s weird work, narration. Luckily, I don’t do it that much because you want to get it right so badly that you got to keep at it, keep that focus and intensity. Then they’ll be like, 'Your voice sounds a little scratchy, maybe we should take a break?' Yeah, no kidding! You do it really hard for a day and then you sort of take a break. I’ve never done more than two episodes in one sitting. I guess it’s easier than a lot of things, but it’s sort of fatiguing mentally." McEnroe says he's learned from his wife, he singer Patty Smyth, that water is important for keeping your voice right.
• Meet Megan Suri: Never Have I Ever's new addition is coming from Netflix's Atypical