It is an achievement for any series to end in a place where the story has a natural or planned conclusion. The number of series left open-ended by cancellations is vast. So Never Have I Ever has already achieved something special in reaching a fourth season that ends with a conclusion planned by series creators Lang Fisher and Mindy Kaling.
The fourth season picks up in the aftermath of the season three finale, AKA Devi (played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Ben (played by Jaren Lewison) hooking up. And if you paid attention to the rest of the series leading up to that event, or have just watched enough teen dramas, you could predict that despite them both wanting to pursue more than just a hook-up with each other, they were both left thinking that was all it was. Fast-forward to the start of their senior year and Ben’s in a relationship with Margot (played by Victoria Moroles). Classic teen drama conflict. While I suspected the story would lead to their eventual reconciliation, a large part of me held out hope that Devi would perhaps take a page out of the book she was recommending to Paxton (played by Darren Barnet) and focus on herself.
For me, the show was always at its best when it focused on friendship and family drama. And this season did not disappoint in those regards. Nirmala (played by Ranjita Chakravarty) had started seeing someone and after a bumpy introduction, eventually so does Nalini (played by Poorna Jagannathan). Everyone is moving on, which plays perfectly with the senior conflict of getting into (or not getting into) the schools of your dreams, and friends facing the prospect of no longer walking the halls together and seeing each other every day. This worked well with Paxton returning as the assistant swim coach because now you had someone who was recently a student and ruled the school in that capacity trying to figure out where and how he fits in now.
For the most part, teen dramas go one of two ways with colleges. They either have the students all going off to Ivy Leagues, despite the low percentages of acceptance that would make the math improbable. Or if they actually plan to have the series transition to follow them to college, they will often invent a liberal arts school. Never Have I Ever falls into the first category, though at least they spent their early seasons talking up these same schools. But for a show set in Sherman Oaks, it would be nice to have protagonists wanting to go to UCLA, SC, or Cal. They made a nice connection between why Devi wants to go to Princeton connected to her father, and I do love that they show she’s still holding on to the grief of her father’s death even after all these years. Perhaps it is a silly reason to decide on a college that costs an insane amount of money, but people make crazier decisions, and frankly half the people I know that went to college either didn’t pursue a career in their undergraduate degree or changed degrees after they started. Life decisions are hard at 18, so that is one of the more reasonable storylines and reasons I’ve seen for a character in any TV series make to justify their reasoning behind choosing an Ivy League school.
TV shows are about growth, watching a character change from where they started to where they end up. Devi in the finale still misses her father but is grieving his loss much better than in the pilot and is better at expressing her feelings. We won’t get to see the college journey, but one can hope she keeps coming into herself and gaining new experiences. And if you’re like me, eventually outgrows Ben.
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