(courtesy IMP Awards)
We are a curious concoction.
We spend out the growing up part of our lives looking forward to the adult part of being alive, convinced that this transition will be the thing that defines and makes us, that will confirm that everything we’ve done up to that point has been our while.
But then you get there and it’s not quite what you expected; still, as the fourth and sadly final season of Never Have I Ever beautifully and heartwrenchingly explores, that may not necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, it could be yet another valuable life lesson which it certainly proves to be for Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) who, in typically chaotic but heartfelt fashion, finds herself staring down the end of her time at high school both sure of where she wants to head and with whom but not entirely sure, souk-crushingly so at times, if she’s going to make any of it happen.
She’s not alone; her two besties, Eleanor Wong (Ramona Young), who yearns to be the successful actor her mother never was, and Fabiola Torres (Lee Rodriguez), a talented robotics engineer in the making, are similarly stuck between the hoped-for and the realistically realised and unsure about what to do if their grand plans don’t exactly manifest as envisioned.
You might argue that every high schooler goes through this exact same process so what makes the journeys of these core characters, and others like Ben Gross (Jaren Lewison) and Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet), all that watchable if we’ve seen it all before?
Quite a lot actually because from its first season and right through seasons two and three, Never Have I Ever has always had at its very heart what it is like to navigate these key moments in anyone’s life when you are simultaneously carrying an extraordinarily weight of grief too.
If you recall, the show starts with Devi is in the tumultuous throes of losing her devoted dad Mohan (Sendhil Ramamurthy) who drops dead at a performance of the high school orchestra of which she’s a member (harps player represent!) and plunges 15-year-old Devi into a world of hurt so profound and excoriatingly awful that spends most of the first season making a thousand wrong and messy decisions and suffering for them.
Granted that doesn’t stop through the next three seasons but the severity lessens and as her long-suffering but enormously nurturing therapist, Dr Jamie Ryan (Niecy Nash) notes in the final episode of the entire show, “… said goodbye” – they are all riffs on the game, Never Have I Ever, which actually gets played at the wedding of Devi’s grandmother Nirmala (Ranjita Chakravarty) while the friends all spend one last night together – Devi has come a hell of a long way.
Her friends pay tribute to her too because while she has left chaos and mess in her wake more often than not, that’s the result of someone who lives her life to the full and who has been brave enough to approach the hot guys (for better or ill), to dream of going to Princeton and to tenaciously go for broke even when she’s been weighed down by the ever-present grief.
As character growth arcs go, Devi is right there at the top, but her journey, even in the final ten episodes ever of this great big affirming hug of a show, is uneven and stop-starty to the hilt and that’s good because that’s how real life is.
It’s tempting in stories like Devi’s to wash away the grief and the trials and tribulations with a quick, heart-pleasing narrative scrub but the truth is, if that had happened to her, she wouldn’t have meant anything like she does to us because by the end of the series, when she’s living her best life where she wants to be and loved by who she wants to be loved, she’s damn well earned every last bit of that happiness.
And that is the great pleasure of this show.
We get to watch Devi and the others grow up and not do it easily or well at times; it would nice if life wasn’t full of regrets but it is and Devi has a truckload of them but even so, by the end they are the making of her, and it’s this authenticity of experience and the grounded emotional resonance of a show that knows how to be heartfelt and hilarious in equal measure, that makes Never Have I Ever, once again backgrounded by the pop soundtrack of your dreams, such an embracingly wonderful show to watch.
It’s different to a lot of high school-set TV shows because it gets that life is rarely some sort of linear triumphantly narrative rich experience and that often we go hurtling backwards even more than we get to rush enthusiastically forward.
Watching Devi go back and forth feels real and true, and makes you love her even more than you do because it feels like something we’ve all gone through.
As final seasons go, season four is a transcendent joy, giving us both a series of happy endings but also some trademark character moments, particularly for Devi who finds that her dreams of study at an Ivy League school and love with the man of her dreams – whoever the hell he might be; pssst! Pick the person she’s sparred with the most and you’ll likely be on the right track – may not be what she ends up getting but that that may be okay too.
Buoyant with hope and expectation but also crushing disappointment and the dead hand of reality, the final season of Never I Have Ever which gave us vibrant good honour, richly observed characters and some incredibly moving and intimate moments (especially when it comes to the endless sadness of grief and how it persists long after we think it will, affecting us all the way) is the perfect sendoff to a show which knows how the very worst parts of being human can wreck us, most particularly when we’re growing up, but how we’re capable of growing into so much more if we just hang in there.
Saying goodbye to Devi and the gang is a real wrench because who hasn’t loved being a part of their fallible but lovingly inclusive world. but as Never Have I Ever ends with a montage of post-high school life for everyone, we’re at least comforted knowing that Devi got there in the end, and who knows, maybe we will too one day.
And another interview …
And some fun between friends …