Q&A: Breaking it Down: ‘The Mindy Project’ showrunner talks about the show’s ‘compromised’ happily ever after

In the series finale of Hulu’s “The Mindy Project”— the show led by a romantic comedy-obsessed, neurotic heroine — things concluded with a happily ever after of the to-be-determined variety.

Ahead of the final season launch earlier this year, Mindy Kaling, who plays titular character Dr. Mindy Lahiri, said she thought fans would find the show’s ending true to the character they’ve come to know.

“There’s a nice surprise that happens to her where you’re, like: OK, the part of her that we love isn’t dead — the part of her that’s optimistic and believes in romance,” Kaling told The Times.

[Warning: This article contains major spoilers from the series finale.]

Titled “It Had to be You,” the finale, which became available on Hulu on Tuesday, the finale finds workaholic Lahiri faced with another life-changing moment: Her fertility clinic is in jeopardy of closing unless she can secure other financial backing. She ends up getting support from an unexpected source: baby daddy and former fiancé Danny Castellano (Chris Messina). — a surprising development considering he had opposed Mindy starting her own business in the first place. But, he admits, he was wrong.

The romantic comedy ending was set in motion while Mindy was giving a speech at the wedding of Morgan and Tamra, played by Ike Barinholtz and Xosha Roquemore, respectively. In talking about how much the couple had changed over the years and the importance of timing in their relationship, Mindy triggered her own a-ha moment and came to the realization that maybe the same applied to her relationship with Danny.

And, in a callback to the series premiere, Mindy raced by bike from the wedding reception to the hospital where Danny’s mom, Annette (Rhea Perlman), had just undergone surgery. Danny, though, was clueless about why Mindy had shown up. After some confusion and awkwardness, she eventually proclaimed: “I was going to say that I never stopped loving you, and I don’t think I ever will.”

They kiss. And they fight — because what would Mindy and Danny be without some bickering? That is, until an exasperated Mindy says: “Can we just watch TV? We have the rest of our lives to argue.”

The series closes with the two sitting on a couch and watching TV, presumably restarting their happily ever after.

We spoke to Matt Warburton, the show’s executive producer and showrunner, to discuss the conclusion of the series.

How much did you know about how you wanted to end it before starting to write the final 10 episodes?

We figured it out pretty quick. I would say this season broke about as easily as any that we've ever done. A lot of it depended on — I can talk about this more openly now — whether Chris was into it and available. And it turned out we got really lucky with all of our guest stars, especially Chris being really excited about what we wanted to do.

So we locked that in really early and we knew exactly how many episodes he was going to be in, so it gave us a lot of freedom to really plot out what we wanted to do. We needed to do two things: to have something happen that requires them to work together— which is the Annette story line, which was Mindy's great idea — and then construct something where we visually see that Danny had corrected his bad behaviors that had broken them up, which is the story line that had Jody taking his equity out of the company and Danny helping.

Because, look, we put a lot of work into breaking them up. And we were really proud that we got people to blame Danny and not Mindy.

Had that been harder to achieve than expected?

It was the hardest thing we've done. Much, much harder, by the way, than finishing even the series. But, in retrospect, we were glad we did because it gave us three more years of stories.

But we knew we had to get them back together. They're at a point now: “We're going to give it one more try, we know it's gone badly in the past, but we've all grown a lot since then.” But we didn't want to speed it up too much because we thought it would just be dishonest given Danny's bad behavior. But I think what hopefully will exonerate it to the audience is that Danny goes right at the thing that broke them up and completely admits that he was wrong. We wanted the audience to be convinced that he really realizes that he messed up.

Did the writers have a Plan B in place in case Chris wasn’t available or into the story line?

No, we didn't. I'm glad he wanted to do it. He's such a busy guy, HBO had to let him out of a thing to do it and he was really great about being completely game for what we wanted to do.

There’s obviously some callbacks to the series premiere — Mindy giving a speech at a wedding and the bike. Talk about the growth we see in having the episodes mirror each other.

All that was very intentional and we wanted to show what the “project” of the whole thing has been about.

You look at her giving that drunken speech in the first episode. She's just talking to herself. And six years of spending time with all these people, most of whom weren't even in her life at the beginning of the series — she's seen them grow, they've helped her grow, and allowed her to make this big move that we get to watch.

It was fun going back and nice that, when you finish something, you can look at it as a big unit now. People can forever find the whole thing on Hulu starting at the beginning and it is such a nice feeling to have a bookend like that.

Did you ever think you'd be writing Morgan getting married?

No! Definitely not. And some people were mad at us that we ended the series with Morgan's wedding and not Mindy's. But the Morgan character has become such a big, important part of the show. It was one of those things we never planned. It just kept growing and growing. In Morgan's own mind I always think that he's starring in “The Morgan Project” and there was a whole TV show about him and so really, he got to have his series now rather than Mindy, I think.

Who do we have to thank for the Jason Derulo dance break?

That was all me. I love that song. That's the one song at my own wedding that I requested that they did not play. The DJ forgot to play it and ...

Are there quotation marks around forgot?

Maybe. Or maybe he just hates Jason Derulo. Or my wife might have said something. But yeah,I love that Jason Derulo song and I feel like it never became a big enough hit. So it was a thrill to get to see everyone forced to dance to it.

Fans had been wondering how much of a storybook ending there’d be —

Yeah, I think we give a preview of her compromised happily ever after — where they're still going to annoy the hell out of each other but maybe they'll be smarter about it than they were the last time.

In the pantheon of series finales, do you view this as one open for interpretation?

I believe in the “Sopranos” thing of, this show ends when it ends and you don't know what happens after that. So, who knows? Maybe we'll get to revisit these characters someday and we'll fill in the blanks. But I'm happy with where we left it.

What do you suspect Mindy and Danny ended up watching on that TV?

I picture them fighting about what to watch. Danny wants “Blue Bloods” or “JAG” (his favorite) and Mindy wants “Real Housewives.”