“I’ve led kind of an interesting life, and I drink and party and I am funny and have a good group of friends. And I wonder, why isn’t that on TV or in the movies?” Her favorite romantic comedy is Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, the film about love found on the Internet, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. “I saw it when it first came out,” she says “when I was an intern at Late Night With Conan O’Brien. I was 18 and very intimidated by New York, and this movie made me fall in love with the city.” She admires the film for its restraint: “A lot of romantic comedies now have to be R-rated sex comedies. Do you even see anything other than Meg Ryan’s wrists in You’ve Got Mail? She dresses like a female comedy writer—nothing is fitted, everything is four sizes too big.” Kaling watches the movie in fifteen-minute intervals, “when I’m doing sit-ups after a run or something, and it’ll cheer me up. That and The Fugitive. Whenever that’s on, even the last five minutes, I’m in.”