'The Mindy Project' Season 4 Premiere: What We Liked, What Didn't Work, and Our Burning Questions

Warning: This post contains character and storyline spoilers for the “While I Was Sleeping” episode of The Mindy Project.

Let’s just get the business of thanking Hulu for saving The Mindy Project out of the way first. Our love affair with all things Dr. Lahiri and the Shulman’s Women’s Health gang was far from over when Fox broke up with them last spring. It would have been too much to bear — never meeting Mindy’s parents, fearing Danny Castellano the curmudgeon was forever stuck sweating in India with no good Italian food for miles, wondering if our leading lady ever got the happy ending she pines for. We may have even died of heartbreak. Probably not, but now we never have to find out, so thanks, Hulu, You saved lives today.

Related: Ken Tucker Reviews the Season 4 Premiere of 'The Mindy Project’

The Season 4 premiere, “While I Was Sleeping,” picked up right where we left off, with Danny boldly flying to India to find the Lahiris and declare his love and intentions for their daughter he knocked up. Which he does… to the help, who don’t speak English. When the real Papa Lahiri appears, he chickens out, acts like he is visiting the country to sightsee, and learns of their plan to arrange a marriage.

Alerted to Dr. C’s absence at Peter’s wedding by Morgan, who vows to find the missing MD, Mindy starts spiraling about where her baby daddy has run off to, why he won’t just marry her, and how her life might be better if she’d fallen in love with someone else. In a nod to the rom-coms Mindy idolizes, she falls asleep and wakes up in a seemingly perfect parallel universe where Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who plays the producer of her favorite franchise, Bravo’s Real Housewives) wasn’t scared to put a massive ring on it after they hooked up in the lavatory on that fated flight from L.A., Jon Stewart is her Gramercy Park neighbor, she isn’t pregnant so she can have “sushi and a 40” for lunch, and her South Park pinball machine has been rescued from storage and displayed prominently in her living room.

But as in 13 Going on 30, Big, It’s A Wonderful Life, Sliding Doors, and so many other dual-life films, Mindy quickly realizes that the grass is not always greener on the other side and you should be careful what you wish for. She also of course realizes that she and Danny complete each other and make each other better people and conveniently, after Morgan shows up in Mumbai and forces the issue, Danny comes to the same conclusion.

Watch the full episode:

What We Liked: The dream sequence scenario and using rom-com tropes like a now handicapped best friend (even though it turned out to be fake), and the big speech and even bigger kiss in the rain on a New York City street were signature TMP. As was having JGL spout dirty-dressed-as-cutesy lines like “I should get used to s—ing my own D for the rest of my L.” (Even funnier was Morgan’s answer to how he found Danny: “Cousin Lou used to be a detective… in a porno.” And don’t even get us started on his Danny “I have all these qualms” impression.) We loved the parents. From missing Dunkin’ Donuts and breaking out in song while explaining that a community theater part was too small for her to their exaggerated statements about love and marriage, viewers could totally see how Mindy would develop into the woman she is living under that roof.

What Didn’t Work: Rom-coms usually require some suspension of disbelief, and in this case, we were supposed to just accept the incredibly unrealistic timeline. Danny went all the way to India, went through all the shenanigans with her parents, had an epiphany, managed to buy an acceptable diamond ring, fly back to New York, and propose just as Mindy awoke from sleeping the night she was told he was MIA in what seemed like dawn’s light. Oh, and Morgan also had time to make a wrong stop in Pakistan, get hazed by terrorists, and then join him in India to help him see the light. A stretch even for genre diehards. For a character that is body-positive, never feels guilty about eating junk food and not exercising, and never had issues landing hotties in the past, Mindy was a little too hard on herself when she first awoke to find JGL between her sheets. “What’s with this guy, smoking hot, lives in a soap opera set, and he wanted to marry my fat ass? Am I blackmailing him?” Also we get that dreams are often surreal and weird and have quirky unexplainable details, but of all her exes that she could be cheating with, why on earth would she pick Brendan Deslaurier (Mark Duplass)? And the thought of the “pedo” role-playing game crossed the line from funny to off-putting.

Related: Fall TV Preview: Scoop on 66 Returning Shows

Our Burning Questions: Why did her faux wedding photo look so early ’90s? I mean, c’mon, there appeared to be Bumpit action. With an unlimited budget and her fab style, surely her hair and dress would have been on fleek. Even the prom pose and bouquet seemed dated. Given that Mindy Kaling told Yahoo TV that audiences won’t have to wait long for the bouncing bundle of joy to make his appearance and Danny’s supersweet proposal at the end of the episode, we were left wondering if we’ll get a chance to see an actual wedding. Will they be one of those hip couples who wait until their out-of-wedlock child can be the ring bearer, or will Danny’s Catholicism kick in and they’ll do a quickie ceremony offscreen to make everything legal and official? Hoping for the former just so we can see what costume designer Salvador Perez would come up with for her big day.

Watch a sneak peek of the next episode of TMP:

New episodes of The Mindy Project will be available on Hulu weekly.