Kaling stars with Thompson as an aspiring comedy writer, Molly Patel, who lands the “Late Night” writing gig. Molly walks in to an all-white-male writers’ room, cheerily offering up a stack of cupcakes.

The film takes the idea of the minority hire to its most absurd incarnation, but Kaling lands it because the writing is so witty. Her career has been defined by this ability to tackle age-old tropes in unconventional ways.

Kaling herself is no stranger to being the only woman in a writers’ room—at 24, she was the only woman among eight writers for The Office, and the only woman of color for the entire run of the show. As Kaling staffed up her two most recent projects, who and how she hired was top of mind.

Also out this summer is Kaling’s remake of Four Weddings and a Funeral for Hulu—a 10-episode mini-series based on the 1994 film. It’s a bold move and she knows it: “It was such an iconic movie, I couldn’t do a strict adaptation,” she says. Instead, she wanted to do a re-creation set in London with expats and young Brits, and with characters who “don’t look like the originals.” So she cast Nathalie Emmanuel and Nikesh Patel as leads, but says the “essence of the movie will still be intact.”

Kaling’s 2003 Off Broadway hit Matt & Ben, a satirical play about the friendship between Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, scored her a job in the writers’ room of NBC’s The Office. Show-runner Greg Daniels told the Times in 2011 that Kaling ended up on his radar because of a spec script she had written. “If anything feels phony or lazy or passé, she’ll pounce on it,” he said.

Kaling also played the character of Kelly Kapoor, a fresh face on a show that was pushing comedic boundaries: a diverse cast of characters who were sometimes disruptive, mostly odd. Kaling didn’t rely on stereotypes about Indian-Americans in the workplace, but, with Kapoor, put forth a representation we hadn’t seen before: an American-born desi who is ambivalent about her identity. She’s not quiet or humble, and she’s not particularly great at her job, either. But Kaling herself was pretty good at her job—by the final season, which aired in 2013, in addition to being a writer and actor, she was an executive producer.

Shortly before The Office ended, Fox green-lighted Kaling’s own show, The Mindy Project, a quirky single-camera sitcom about a gynecology practice based in New York City. Kaling starred as Mindy Lahiri. Bela Bajaria, then the president of Universal Television, which produced the show, says she knew Kaling had something special to say from day one. “Her script for The Mindy Project was funny, distinct, and explored a multi-dimensional Indian-American female character who celebrated flaws and all,” Bajaria, now a Netflix exec, says.

The cast teemed with talent: Chris Messina, Ike Barinholtz, Ed Weeks; recurring guest spots from the likes of the Duplass brothers and Garret Dillahunt; and smaller parts from Bill Hader, Anna Camp, even Rhea Perlman. The writing was fresh and interesting; the comedy had less to do with work and more to do with Lahiri’s friends, family, and quest to find love.

The Mindy Project was also revolutionary. Viewers, including, importantly, women like myself, had never seen a character like Lahiri before, never mind in a leading role. Kaling turned one of the most common tropes about Indian-Americans on its head: the aspiring, straight-A student who becomes a physician. Lahiri is a doctor, but she is not quiet or particularly geeky. She takes up space (sometimes to the point of narcissism), dresses in bright colors, subsists on rom-coms. She dates, and she likes sex. She is also sometimes offensive—this was no “good Indian girl.”