Last year, I loved New Girl. It provided raunchy, brilliantly immature, laugh-out-loud fun, with a female protagonist. It was basically a show from a guy’s perspective with a woman as the lead. The same went for The Mindy Project‘s pilot. Sure, both shows feature pretty women with long hair who date random good-looking guys while surrounded by adorable male leads, but for the most part, you could’ve swapped Mindy Kaling/Zooey Deschanel with a man and I wouldn’t’ve noticed. However, recently, both shows have gotten into the lady business quite explicitly, and I can’t tell if I’m tired of it or not. Yes, we need more shows with female leads, but I’m tired of TV reducing its heroines to walking vaginas. Jokes about crazy, hormonal women are tiresome and reductive. Until recently, I didn’t get mood swings, so I hated male-written shows *cough* Guys with Kids *cough* that told one-dimensional jokes about crazy women at the female character’s expense. I want to make certain New Girl and Mindy Project don’t fall into that habit.

When last week surrounded Jess’ period and Mindy’s gynecology exam, I squirmed uncomfortably and said, “okay, I hope they don’t do THAT again.” Then, this week they covered reproduction. While Jess and Cece wondered about their reproductive abilities post-age 30, Mindy tried to prevent her adolescent neighbor from having sex (and accidentally having a kid). Don’t get me started about Schmidt seeing Jess’ Ob-GYN while Mindy awkwardly talked about babies with a boner-worthy male teenager.

All I have to ask is, Mindy Project/New Girl: what is up with all the va-jay-jay talk? I’m a woman. Yes. I have a vagina. Yes. But, I don’t necessarily need to see a show talk about it 24-7. Why do TV shows feel the need to base its comedy on the female’s genitalia, instead of humor? Dude, it’s kinda normalizing. With its second season, it feels like the New Girl writers are taking their pants off, getting comfortable and letting Jess talk more about her lady bits. But, you know what? Put your pants back on. I just don’t want to see/hear that. If you can remind me that I’m a gal, without reminding me that I bleed on a monthly basis, I’m down with that.

BUT … while I DON’T want to be reminded of my lady bits and I DON’T want to have shows that cover it back-to-back 24-7, at the same time, I wasn’t offended when Mindy Project and New Girl covered it, like I normally am. I won’t lie, during that time of the month, I literally want to kick the testicles off all the men within a five-mile radius. So, I understood Jess’ pain. When I started my new job, I was stressed and underwent two periods a month for six months. Yea. That’s a lot of mood swings. My male co-workers currently think I’m crazy and run whenever I near a bottle of Advil. So, yes, I totally laughed at Jess’ interview.

I eventually realized that I felt uncomfortable with New Girl’s lady boner talk because it was totally honest without that reductive “women are crazy” gloss other shows tend to add. And, I realized I was more afraid male writers might watch the episode and think, “yea … women are crazy” without actually getting it. David Chapelle said he quit the Chapelle Show because he heard a staff member laughing at his jokes and it sounded like the wrong type of laughter. And, maybe that’s my fear; that by focusing on lady bits, New Girl and Mindy Project will reinforce stereotypes rather than subverting them.

Surprisingly, Mindy Project, a show about a gynecologist, isn’t as raunchy as New Girl concerning lady jay bits. While watching Danny attempt to give Mindy a breast exam was incredibly awkward, watching her hand out condoms to female teens was awesome. My high school health teacher put the fear in me. But, when people address teen sex on TV shows, it’s about feelings and forever. No one ever addresses hideous STDs that can damage your lady parts like gonorrhea. So, yes, I LOVED her scare tactics. And, yes, I loved watching Mindy’s personality waffle between an immature post-adolescent wannabe awkwardly counseling teens while attempting to seem cool and the crochety adult she secretly was who chided teens about texting, rudeness, and poor volleyball aim. This summer I worked with a bunch of teens and people in their early twenties who drove me up the wall. Back in my day, if someone wanted to borrow something they asked directly. But, instead, today’s young adults ask loudly “does someone have x I want to borrow” while looking directly at you.

So … Mindy Project/New Girl: I think you guys are awesome. While I get what you’re doing, don’t do it too much. My biggest fear is that it’ll continue to reduce women to walking crazy jokes, rather than playing with something we all deal with. While maybe New Girl isn’t hitting every single episode out of the ball park like in season one and subsequent Mindy Project episodes aren’t as awesome as the pilot, it’s still smart, funny TV for any gender. And, it’s leagues above Two and Half a Men, which is one-dimensional fart jokes re-told for nine years. So, maybe I shouldn’t complain. If a show about Charlie Sheen’s penis could survive for this long, maybe I can suck it up and deal whenever Mindy Project/New Girl talk about Lady Jay, and just appreciate their casts’ acting talents and their writers’ sly abilities. After all, the Tuesday night 9:00-10:00pm block is my favorite night of television.

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FOX’s The Mindy Project and New Girl are two of FOX’s stronger comedies. So, it makes sense to place them back to back. But this week I noticed eerie similarities between the two. Admittedly, beneath the surface they aren’t the same show; but on the surface they look pretty similar. Tuesday night I got total déjà vu watching them back to back. 15 minutes into the Mindy Project, I kept wondering why everything seemed so similar until I realized I watched it earlier on New Girl …

My top five reasons why Mindy Project and New Girl are the same show:

1. They Share the Same Plot

Both shows are about strong female characters re-defining their lives after their former boyfriends kick them to the curb. But, that’s pretty surface stuff. That didn’t bother me. But, this Tuesday both shows had similar premises. New Girl focused on Jess and Nick’s friends-without-benefits relationship while the Mindy Project surrounded the antagonistic Mr. Darcy/Elizabeth Bennet relationship between Mindy and Danny.

2. The Male Characters Are the Same

The male characters cut from the same template. New Girl features vain wannabe playa Schmidt, curmudgeonly Nick, and ambiguous yet awesome Winston. Likewise, The Mindy Project features vain, womanizer Jeremy alongside curmudgeonly Danny. This week, The Mindy Project introduced a male nurse character, who like Winston arrives after the other characters gelled.

Hell, two-thirds of the characters look like each other. Danny’s scruffy beard and dark hair perfectly reminds me of Nick’s scruffy beard and dark hair. Likewise, Schmidt’s wavy pretty boy hair definitely mirrors Jeremy’s wavy pretty boy hair.

3. They share the same love setup

Both shows have the same Mr. Darcy/Elizabeth Bennet I’m totally-not-into-you-even-though-we-think-alike-and-spend-too-much-time-together, setup. Both Danny and Nick pretend to dislike spending so much time with their female lead and complain about her uber-female quirks while not-so-secretly obsessing over her. Also, Jess and Nick are roommates while Danny and Mindy are office mates. So yea, both couples are friends by living/work association.

It’s pretty obvious that Nick and Jess will wind up together. Mindy and Danny also make the perfect couple. Part of me is tired of TV series where we have two single, attractive characters who are clearly right for each other, not hooking up. But, considering Jess still needs single time, Nick needs to organize his life, and Danny’s getting over his divorce; those are impediments to both relationships. Also, you don’t crap where you work/live. Both couples better be certain before going forward.

4. They’re Unfailingly Honest

Not only do they share the same characters and love interests, but they also have the same outlook. Not because they’re shows about women, but because they’re unfailingly truthful. Both shows point out life’s idiosyncrasies.

My biggest pet peeve surrounds women’s clothes on TV. If I wore half of what most “professional” female characters wear on TV, I’m certain my manager would send me home. I loved that Mindy’s best friend mocked Mindy’s denim corset top, horn-rimmed glasses and fitted blazer as porno wear. While in TV land, her outfit says “professional woman,” in the real world, it says, “I charge $150 per hour.”

My second pet peeve surrounds female relationships. I have a friend who dates jerk after jerk. But, she doesn’t know how to stop dating them and typically winds up in long-term relationship after long-term relationship with guys she partially considers dodgy. That’s basically’s Jess’s scenario. She’s a serial dater. Even when she sees issues with the guy of the hour, she pushes her doubts aside to focus on the positive … until she can’t focus on that anymore. I love that New Girl incorporated that fixation tendency of humankind with Jess’ latest piece of the week.

5. They have the same wardrobe

Somewhere network executives decided that female leads in comedy series could only wear brightly colored clothes. While Mindy’s style is more of a stylized professional with colors, a cross between what New Girl’s Cece and Jess wear, many of Mindy’s wardrobe choices wouldn’t look out-of-place in Jess’ closet and vice versa.

Final Verdict

While the Mindy Project and the New Girl aren’t carbon copies of each other, they share common core ingredients. Does that make Mindy Project a copy of New Girl? Hmmm … Remember when Jess met Paul’s new girlfriend, who looked, acted and sounded like her … except she was Asian? Well, Mindy Project isn’t Asian New Girl. Sure, they share similar character constructs, similar plots and a love of irreverence, but they’re both good TV and good TV is hard to find. So, even if they’re similar, I don’t care. I’d rather have two original shows that look like each other on the surface — but have sincerity and hilarity underneath — than one original show *cough* Friends *cough* with watered down copies peppered throughout.

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FOX’s live-action comedies haven’t done historically well. Other than Married with Children and That ’70s Show, only their animated comedies have lasted more than a season or two (OK, maybe three). So is it smart to take the risk this season and build an entire night’s schedule around potentially short-lived half-hour comedies? For FOX, the time is ripe, and they are smart enough to run with it.

Last season saw great success with Raising Hope and New Girl. FOX decided to expand Tuesday nights to an all-comedy block and add two new half-hour comedies, Ben & Kate and The Mindy Project. No drama is going to fill House‘s eight-season-sized shoes and FOX isn’t even trying — a smart move. Sure, there’s The Mob Doctor, but the similarities to House end with the time slot and the hospital setting; FOX is not putting their eggs in that basket, which is proven by the amount of marketing being done for the comedies in comparison with The Mob Doctor‘s promos.

It’s immensely brilliant for FOX to build on current successes and not try to carbon-copy past hits. Hop on over to NBC and you’ll see failure after failure, because they’re trying to recreate the success they’ve had with The Office and it’s just not happening. FOX, on the other hand, is making radical decisions and taking risks, letting the past eight seasons of success go and moving on to what’s working for them now.

Ben & Kate has the perfect lead-in in Raising Hope. While not quite as irreverent as Raising Hope, it is a zany family comedy that I suspect will retain much of the Raising Hope audience.

New Girl is also the perfect lead-in to The Mindy Project. People who love the quirky Zooey will stay around to watch the quirky Mindy. Just an aside here — what is NBC thinking, letting Mindy Kaling‘s show go to FOX, especially when she’s a big part of their only hit comedy in recent years? Or perhaps it’s another point on FOX’s scoreboard, that they swiped what could have been the formula for a possible success for NBC. Either way, the chemistry between Mindy Kaling and Chris Messina will keep the New Girl viewers around, after they delight in watching Jess and Nick’s flirtations.

What’s the secret formula? It’s not putting the two comedies you’re going to let die this season on a Friday night as a lead-in to one of your more successful dramas from last season, that’s for sure. Whitney and Community to lead-in Grimm? Really NBC — do you want Grimm to die too?

Back to the secret formula: pay attention to what is working, and expand on that, add to it and break out of your former successes. If The Office is dying a slow death, it’s time to move on. FOX stopped relying on their House formula, and the focus on the expansion of their successful comedies is a smart move that will pay off.