The Internet's response to the news that Mindy Kaling is pregnant with her first child was a Hollywood triumph.
It became a Twitter Moment, of course, with fans quickly assembling every apropos Mindy Project or Kelly Kapoor GIF to express their delight as word spread like wildfire across social media. Basically, people immediately stopped what they were doing and threw Kaling a virtual party.
The reception wasn't quite Beyoncé-twins-level (what ever was or ever will be again, really?) but it should answer any lingering questions anyone might have about Kaling's impact on pop culture and whether fans have connected with her over the years, be it through her TV shows, her books, her talk show and magazine interviews or her social media presence. Or all of the above.
There's a reason why some fans tweeted things like "Mindy's pregnant, so I'm pretty much pregnant" or joked that they were happier for her than they would be for a member of their own family. Or maybe they weren't joking.
We talk about Internet boyfriends, but Kaling has become an Internet BFF, someone you absolutely would hang out with in a second if the opportunity ever arose. Or someone you feel that you've already hung out with.
Her humorous 2011 memoir Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), which self-deprecatingly addressed real-girl worries about fitting in, body image, finding and maintaining relationships and figuring out Hollywood, was a best-seller and served wide notice that she was a young voice to be reckoned with—not just as a woman or as a minority (though she's been lauded for her accomplishments through both lenses), but as a hilarious, whip-smart, successful businesswoman.
Not that she, personally, was serving notice.
"My parents love [the book], but my parents think I'm Kate Middleton," she quipped to The Huffington Post when the book first came out. "I'm so perfect to them, like, I could have written a much worse book or something offensive and they would've loved it. I'm basically a princess."
Kaling had been hiding in plain sight, her convincing portrayal of the endearingly ridiculous Kelly on The Office overshadowing the fact that she was also a writer on the hit show, as was the object of her Office obsession and real-life "it's complicated" friend B.J. Novak.
Her book was a phenomenon, further establishing her as one of the funniest women around, but it was when The Mindy Project—starring, created by and executive-produced by Kaling—premiered in 2012 that everyone decided she was the girl for them.
"I love it, but it scares me a little bit, that responsibility," Kaling, a Glamour Woman of the Year in 2014, told the magazine about her recently acquired status as someone whom people both look up to and relate to—and whom they count on for perpetual entertainment. "I want to be a good best friend."
But once the scales tip, once the struggling writer-actor is not even the next big thing any longer because she has already become a really big deal, what happens to the your-problems-are-my-problems image?
The charm can wane if someone's so-called act is built on being relatable but they're out there lunching with Reese Witherspoon and fielding dinner invitations from Sen. Cory Booker. Yet Kaling has always been someone to root for because she didn't bother to pretend that she didn't want to achieve certain things—and she worked her butt off to get there. So while she hasn't lost the ability to laugh at herself or to communicate whatever's on her mind in the wittiest way possible without it seeming like she's trying too hard, more importantly she hasn't tried to cloak her success in an "oh, this ol' thing" attitude.
Nor has she ever wanted the focus to be on how much she achieved "as a..."
"I know why people are interested and I know why people want me to speak about it," she told NPR's Morning Edition in 2014. "But I sort of refuse to be an outsider, even though I know that I very much look like one to a lot of people, and I refuse to view myself in such terms."
Kaling also translated the experience of going after and achieving success into her second book, Why Not Me?, which recalled a lot of the thought process that went into creating her own show, including the consideration that went into naming it after herself.
But of course there can also be pressure once you're viewed as a Voice For Women to always be banging the drum for all the women.
"I too feel guilty when I don't have knee-jerk unconditional love for all the decisions or all the art made by every woman I see," Kaling admitted to friend Lena Dunham when the Girls star interviewed her for Rookie magazine in 2013. "But that's OK. I think most educated and empathetic women probably feel the same way. Like, I don't like comedy shows where women play cutesy instruments as part of their comedy routine. But I don't like it when guys do that, either."
Incidentally, any impression that she constantly has women's issues or the plight of women in Hollywood on the brain is also largely the result of a vicious Q&A cycle.
"More than half the questions I am asked are about the politics of the way I look," Kaling said. "What it feels like to be not skinny/dark-skinned/a minority/not conventionally pretty/female/etc. It's not very interesting to me, but I know it's interesting to people reading an interview. Sometimes I get jealous of white male showrunners when 90 percent of their questions are about characters, story structure, creative inspiration, or, hell, even the business of getting a show on the air.
"Because as a result the interview of me reads like I'm interested only in talking about my outward appearance and the politics of being a minority and how I fit into Hollywood, blah blah blah. I want to shout, 'Those were the only questions they asked!'"
The Mindy Project lasted for three seasons on Fox, an achievement in this peak-TV age when broadcast networks aren't ones to wait it out to see if a series finds its audience, and then its still-sizable loyal following helped propel it to three more seasons on Hulu, the last of which is in production now.
2015 brought its highs and a low for Kaling, though the low of seeing The Mindy Project canceled was quickly transformed into a vote of confidence when Hulu picked it up soon after. She also starred in an ad campaign for American Express, starred in Nationwide's Super Bowl commercial, she became InStyle's first-ever Indian American cover girl, her second book came out and she was one of 10 "Celebrities and Influencers" named to AdWeek's inaugural Creative 100 list.
Asked what kept her motivated to keep writing and always have multiple projects in the works, Kaling told the trade mag, "Without getting too sad, I think that when my mom passed away, I felt like she accomplished only a portion of what she wanted to do. I felt like, OK, I need to squeeze this orange until all of the juice is out of it because I felt uncertainty about my own mortality. So I thought, I always want to be doing a couple of things at once. This might change when I have kids or when I'm married, but until then, I have this need to keep going."
The death of Kaling's mom from pancreatic cancer, the same day that The Mindy Project was greenlighted by Fox, was devastating for the star. The two were extremely close and Kaling based the character of Dr. Mindy Lahiri on her mother, who was also an OB/GYN.
"I was very lucky that the show started up at that time so I could just throw myself into it and distract myself," she told InStyle in 2015 ahead of the show's move to Hulu. "But the truth is, even though it's been three years, it still feels like it just happened. I remember the sound of her voice so distinctly."
Kaling continued, "One inadvertent thing I've learned from her passing is that anything bad could happen to me professionally, but it would not be worse than one sad weekend. The experience of losing my mom was just so much worse than anything that could happen to me workwise. I could lose all my money, and I would be like, it's fine."
And as far as seizing the day goes...
E! News was first to report this week that Kaling is pregnant, an "unexpected surprise," according to a source.
Yet a happy turn of events, because Kaling has said that she wanted children, regardless of relationship status.
"I don't have a particular urge to get married, but I do know with certainty that I want to have kids, because my relationship with [my mom] was so special," Kaling also told InStyle. "She was so proud of [my success]. She kept clippings of everything, I know she bored her patients with stories about me going to the Golden Globes, showing them photos of dresses I was picking between."
Dr. Lahiri became a mom on The Mindy Project a couple seasons ago, with Kaling finding the whole OB/GYN-accidentally-impregnated-by-another-OB/GYN plot twist rather hilarious. Regarding the fake pregnancy bump she wore, she told E! News, "I was complaining about it and I'm not even really pregnant. And that's how I think Mindy the character would be like. She's just not going to do pregnancy in a very graceful way."
And if the real Mindy wants to complain, we're all ears.
Meanwhile, the timing actually couldn't be better, because Kaling will have the option of going all in on motherhood while still being fairly ubiquitous onscreen. The final season of The Mindy Project is coming up in the fall, and she has a new sitcom, Champions, headed to NBC. Then she stars in A Wrinkle in Time with Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey (which must mean that Oprah will be in on the baby-gift giving, OMG), which comes out next March.
Kaling is also a member of the powerhouse cast of Ocean's 8, due in theaters June 8, 2018—so the fruits of her labor, no pun intended, will carry on in her stead.
And no, she didn't entirely avoid the pitfalls of all of a sudden being everywhere at once. There may have been what felt like a peak-Mindy moment. There have been online trolls to ignore and critics to not take to heart.
But when someone's life event touches other people's lives the way Kaling's did the other day (and presumably will continue to do until Baby Kaling arrives and beyond), you know that any disturbance in the force was just a blip.
Everyone still wants to know what Mindy Kaling is going to do next, and her fans have been rooting for her every step of the way.
(E!, NBC and Hulu are all members of the NBCUniversal family.)