June 15, 2025 • 10 mins
🩺✨ In this episode of The Rank Podcast, John dives into his Sitcom Rankings with a hilarious look at the 2012 comedy series The Mindy Project! This week, he reviews Season 2, Episode 4 – "Magic Morgan", where Mindy and the gang face unexpected chaos after Beverly returns to the office and Morgan unleashes some… well, magical surprises.
As the workplace dynamic gets even weirder, John unpacks how the show balances quirky characters, romantic tension, and laugh-out-loud moments. Is Morgan’s magic enough to boost this episode into the top sitcom tier? Or does it vanish into thin air?
Tune in to find out where this one lands on the ranks!
E-mail your fan questions, comments and suggestions to TheRankwithJohnandZac@protonmail.com.
Support the show by becoming a patron at Patreon.com/TheRankPodcast.
Visit The Rank's website for up-to-date rankings at TheRankwithJohnandZac.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
If you recall, the previous episode ended with Mindy and
Casey breaking up, ending their engagement.
So this episode was the aftermath.
We've got an episode all about Mindy's struggle to get over the
breakup and move on. I think we've all been there,
right? Breakups suck and it definitely
feels like it's never going to get any better, at least in the
beginning or five years later. Welcome back to another episode
(00:39):
of The Rank. I'm John.
But sure. And today we're going to be
ranking the next episode of The Mindy Project.
Now, if you're enjoying these episodes or if you're just a fan
of The Mindy Project and enjoy consuming content about it,
please subscribe and or follow like the episodes, comment,
e-mail your questions and suggestions and hate mail,
whatever. Please also consider becoming a
(00:59):
patron on our patreonpage@patreon.com/the Rank
podcast where you can get accessto all of our archives. 5
episodes. Now today we're ranking the 4th
episode of the second season of The Mindy Project called Magic
Morgan, written by Tracy Wigfield and directed by Neil
Brennan. And just so you know, spoilers
ahead. Now the whole goal of this is
we're trying to figure out what is the best sitcom of all time.
(01:19):
So I'm ranking every episode from selected sitcoms and we
average the episode rankings, figure out what is the best
sitcom of all time. Let's dive into it here with the
potent opens. So the 4th episode of the second
season aired Tuesday, October 8th, 2013.
The Mindy. The Project seems to have hit
its plateau as it stayed essentially the same this week
as last week, garnering another 2.9 million viewers.
(01:41):
Once again, it was the least watched show of Fox's Tuesday
lineup, but it was closer this time as Dad's.
The 8:00 PM show only got 3.1 million viewers and Brooklyn 99
got 3.3, so it's all fairly close together.
New Girl Mindy's lead in still won the night for Fox anyway,
with 4 million viewers. As for competition, the only
(02:03):
show is a beat in its time slot that were Supernatural in The CW
which had 2.6 million viewers and I Dream of Nae Nae The
Wedding on Bravo which had 1.45 million viewers, whatever that
is. Otherwise it was beaten by The
Voice on NBC which had 10.2 million viewers, Trophy Wife on
ABC which had 4.8 million and NCIS Los Angeles at 14.8
(02:23):
million. Also, the juggernaut NCIS won
the night as always with 18.3 million.
So this episode of The Mindy Project was basically the same
plot as Dane Cook's movie Good Luck Chuck, which acknowledges
in the episode. What I found out is that Ike
Barinholtz, who plays Morgan, used to do impressions of Dane
Cook on Mad TV. Naturally I decided to check it
(02:45):
out. Now I don't know how you all
feel about Dane Cook or how muchyou all know about him, but I
remember enjoying a stand up actand was never into him enough to
know what all the hullabaloo wasabout.
But man, when I watched a clip of a Mad TV sketch with Ike
being Dane and basically the bitwas just that Dane Cook is a
terrible comedian and they all cheered when they got him to
(03:07):
quit doing stand up. I guess I just wasn't expecting
such a mean sketch. Damn.
Anyway, you can all look up Ike's impression.
It was pretty decent. When asked how you can keep a
moronic character from just being a moron, Ike responded.
Quote. It's playing small moments real.
He may have dumb moments, but ifyou play them with a little bit
of humanity, a little bit of soul, if you show them getting
(03:28):
embarrassed, it helps. We often pull from our real life
and we pitch them for the show and they end up on the show.
There's an episode where everyone's doing a pull up
contest and this really happenedto me.
I was working for the Obama campaign in 2008 and I went into
a morning meeting at the campaign office and there was a
pull up bar by the door. There were probably 15 people in
the room. I and I remember I walked up to
(03:50):
the bar and one of the guys saidto me that holds up to 220.
At the time I was a solid 210. I did a pull up and instantly
pulled the bar down, fell down to the ground, smashed the bar
onto my leg and as I hit the ground I farted.
I was so embarrassed that I got up and man out of the room.
So when I had Morgan do that same thing on the show, he was
so embarrassed and so hurt that you can't help but have sympathy
(04:11):
for this creature. I think that goes a long way.
If you feel for the person, thenthat helps.
End Quote. I just thought that was funny.
I wish I'd found that for the episode where that happens, but
I found it now. So you get it now.
All right, Those are the potent notables.
Let's go to the episode overview.
If you recall, the previous episode ended with Mindy and
Casey breaking up, ending their engagement.
So this episode was the aftermath.
We've got an episode all about Mindy's struggle to get over the
(04:33):
breakup and move on. I think we've all been there,
right? Breakups suck.
And it definitely feels like it's never going to get any
better, at least in the beginning, five years later.
So we start off pretty related. Mindy is struggling to get to
work after the breakup and on a rainy day, naturally.
And she trips over a box, like it, like an Amazon box at the
(04:53):
stoop of her office and finds that it's for a lawyer that
works in the building. So she takes it up to him and
opens it, by the way, because she wants to threaten him with a
lawsuit. Now the lawyer, his name's
Cliff, was played by Glenn Howerton of It's Always Sunny in
Philadelphia. This happens and you think all
are sparks gonna fly between these two, you know?
(05:14):
But but they didn't go that route.
Instead, he just, he's just annoyed by her, if not a little
amused. But this seems like nothing.
But it will. It will end up coming back
later. So everyone at the office finds
out about the breakup and feel bad for her.
But Morgan insists on telling her that a 7th ex has broken up
with him and ended up meeting her future husband.
So Mindy dismisses this at first, but when Morgan shows up
(05:35):
at her door later to console herand she's had a lot of wine, she
decides that hooking up with Morgan just might be the right
move. Before it happens though, she
starts to sober up and realize it's a bad idea and Morgan is a
little hurt. I should say that Morgan did try
to resist her at first, but gavein when she started crying.
So now this is when we get Cliffto re enter the episode.
(05:56):
Morgan has hired him to sue Mindy for sexual harassment,
which quickly goes away when Morgan says he'll drop it if
Mindy agrees to go on an ice dinner date with him, which she
never really does agree to. Jeremy and Danny agree on her
behalf. Now during all this A story, the
B story is the new Doctor Peter Prentice, who was introduced
last episode is working on fitting in with everything.
(06:17):
Danny is the one that has the biggest issue with him,
especially after Peter purposelytouches his penis.
So that's not great. I think it's pretty reasonable
that Danny is upset about this and it leads to them firing him
for about two seconds, but Jeremy decides to give him a
second chance. Now all throughout the episode
it is littered with jokes and clips and clever writing.
Like when Morgan finds out that Casey and Mindy broke up, he
(06:40):
exclaims did he leave you for a white woman?
Glenn Howerton's sarcasm is great, Peter Prentice's
growingness, it all worked really well.
Eventually Mindy and Morgan go on their date and naturally
Mindy adds up enjoying herself and Danny is able to see Peter's
value and Peter's not afraid to do the stuff that they don't
want to, which is apparently a tub births.
I don't know why a water birth is something that they don't
(07:03):
want to do, but whatever. Either way, we end the episode
with Mindy and Cliff clearly being into each other, setting
up a new boyfriend for Mindy. So let's head to the rink.
The rank is where I rank the episode based on five category
story, acting, dialogue, episodecoherence, and character
relatability. I rank it on scale of one to
five, one being the worst and five being the best.
(07:25):
And then we have a laugh counter.
I tally up the amount of times the episode made me laugh out
loud and that gets added to the score.
The first category story, which I gave a 4.25 and I thought this
was a really good story and a relatable 1.
The story is pretty simple too, getting over a breakup.
So there's a bunch of silly story stuff in the middle here,
like Mindy considering sleeping with Morgan because she hopes it
will and meeting someone and Morgan suing her for sexual
(07:48):
harassment. So it's not a 5 because of the
silliness, but it's still quite good.
Let's go to acting, which I gavea 4.25.
I thought everyone was excellentin this.
I mean, there are still moments where it's not great.
Mindy didn't do a great job withcrying and Ike Barinholtz
obviously wasn't perfect with Being Earnest, but it was really
good. Adam Pally clearly seems like
he's going to be a great addition to the cast also.
(08:10):
So dialogue I gave A5 witty and fun and filled with jokes and
laughter. I mean, and this was the type of
writing that we saw a lot in thefirst half of the first half of
the first season. I loved it.
I'm hoping it continues. So let's go to episode
coherence, which I gave a 3.75 S.
The episode coherence was great as far as the characters were
concerned and ultimately was fine as far as story goes, but
(08:32):
it did jump around with it. Cliff the lawyer played by Glenn
Howerton being involved was great, but getting him involved
was pretty flimsy. Not terrible.
You know, it's, it's a sitcom. They don't have a lot of time to
to get these in. So I get it.
Also, Pete's involved everythingto do with Mindy's love life
seems a little earlier even for Mindy, but again, not terrible.
(08:52):
All in all, it was it was reallygood coherence.
So let's go to character relatability, which I gave a
four. It's not higher simply because
Peter Prentice is ridiculous. He's a little hard to relate to
in a similar way to how Morgan was hard to relate to when they
first introduced him. He just feels very caricatury.
But I'm sure with time he'll become a more rounded character
and be easier to relate to. Everyone else was pretty
(09:13):
relatable, especially me. So that gets us to laugh counter
and this episode got me 25 times, which is a good sign for
an episode. You give me that many times
you're going to I mean so if it was just the laugh counter, it
would be in the mediocre category just that.
So that puts the grand total of the episode up to a 46.25 puts
it right into the the meaning oflife tier, which is the highest
(09:36):
tier. As for the series average.
This bumped it into the next tier, increasing it from a 34.7
to a 35.1, which puts it into tothe Holy Grail tier.
So nice job Magic Morgan. So thanks for listening and or
watching everybody. If you'd like to see a list of
our episode and series rankings,you do that on our website at
the rank of John zack.com. Remember to subscribe, review
(09:59):
and comment and send suggestions.
Please consider supporting us onour Patreon site at
patreon.com/the Rank podcast where you can get access to all
the archived episodes. I'll leave you with this.
What did Morgan originally say when Mindy and Cliff got off the
elevator together? Good luck is good luck, Chuck.
(10:20):
That joke was funnier in theory.Maybe it's.
I can't remember now. Looks I can't remember my own
fucking rankings. Hold on.
That's OK. Take your time.
If you recall, the previous episode ended with Mindy and
Casey breaking up, ending their engagement.
So this episode was the aftermath.
We've got an episode all about Mindy's struggle to get over the
breakup and move on. I think we've all been there,
right? Breakups suck and it definitely
feels like it's never going to get any better, at least in the
beginning or five years later. Welcome back to another episode
(00:39):
of The Rank. I'm John.
But sure. And today we're going to be
ranking the next episode of The Mindy Project.
Now, if you're enjoying these episodes or if you're just a fan
of The Mindy Project and enjoy consuming content about it,
please subscribe and or follow like the episodes, comment,
e-mail your questions and suggestions and hate mail,
whatever. Please also consider becoming a
(00:59):
patron on our patreonpage@patreon.com/the Rank
podcast where you can get accessto all of our archives. 5
episodes. Now today we're ranking the 4th
episode of the second season of The Mindy Project called Magic
Morgan, written by Tracy Wigfield and directed by Neil
Brennan. And just so you know, spoilers
ahead. Now the whole goal of this is
we're trying to figure out what is the best sitcom of all time.
(01:19):
So I'm ranking every episode from selected sitcoms and we
average the episode rankings, figure out what is the best
sitcom of all time. Let's dive into it here with the
potent opens. So the 4th episode of the second
season aired Tuesday, October 8th, 2013.
The Mindy. The Project seems to have hit
its plateau as it stayed essentially the same this week
as last week, garnering another 2.9 million viewers.
(01:41):
Once again, it was the least watched show of Fox's Tuesday
lineup, but it was closer this time as Dad's.
The 8:00 PM show only got 3.1 million viewers and Brooklyn 99
got 3.3, so it's all fairly close together.
New Girl Mindy's lead in still won the night for Fox anyway,
with 4 million viewers. As for competition, the only
(02:03):
show is a beat in its time slot that were Supernatural in The CW
which had 2.6 million viewers and I Dream of Nae Nae The
Wedding on Bravo which had 1.45 million viewers, whatever that
is. Otherwise it was beaten by The
Voice on NBC which had 10.2 million viewers, Trophy Wife on
ABC which had 4.8 million and NCIS Los Angeles at 14.8
(02:23):
million. Also, the juggernaut NCIS won
the night as always with 18.3 million.
So this episode of The Mindy Project was basically the same
plot as Dane Cook's movie Good Luck Chuck, which acknowledges
in the episode. What I found out is that Ike
Barinholtz, who plays Morgan, used to do impressions of Dane
Cook on Mad TV. Naturally I decided to check it
(02:45):
out. Now I don't know how you all
feel about Dane Cook or how muchyou all know about him, but I
remember enjoying a stand up actand was never into him enough to
know what all the hullabaloo wasabout.
But man, when I watched a clip of a Mad TV sketch with Ike
being Dane and basically the bitwas just that Dane Cook is a
terrible comedian and they all cheered when they got him to
(03:07):
quit doing stand up. I guess I just wasn't expecting
such a mean sketch. Damn.
Anyway, you can all look up Ike's impression.
It was pretty decent. When asked how you can keep a
moronic character from just being a moron, Ike responded.
Quote. It's playing small moments real.
He may have dumb moments, but ifyou play them with a little bit
of humanity, a little bit of soul, if you show them getting
(03:28):
embarrassed, it helps. We often pull from our real life
and we pitch them for the show and they end up on the show.
There's an episode where everyone's doing a pull up
contest and this really happenedto me.
I was working for the Obama campaign in 2008 and I went into
a morning meeting at the campaign office and there was a
pull up bar by the door. There were probably 15 people in
the room. I and I remember I walked up to
(03:50):
the bar and one of the guys saidto me that holds up to 220.
At the time I was a solid 210. I did a pull up and instantly
pulled the bar down, fell down to the ground, smashed the bar
onto my leg and as I hit the ground I farted.
I was so embarrassed that I got up and man out of the room.
So when I had Morgan do that same thing on the show, he was
so embarrassed and so hurt that you can't help but have sympathy
(04:11):
for this creature. I think that goes a long way.
If you feel for the person, thenthat helps.
End Quote. I just thought that was funny.
I wish I'd found that for the episode where that happens, but
I found it now. So you get it now.
All right, Those are the potent notables.
Let's go to the episode overview.
If you recall, the previous episode ended with Mindy and
Casey breaking up, ending their engagement.
So this episode was the aftermath.
We've got an episode all about Mindy's struggle to get over the
(04:33):
breakup and move on. I think we've all been there,
right? Breakups suck.
And it definitely feels like it's never going to get any
better, at least in the beginning, five years later.
So we start off pretty related. Mindy is struggling to get to
work after the breakup and on a rainy day, naturally.
And she trips over a box, like it, like an Amazon box at the
(04:53):
stoop of her office and finds that it's for a lawyer that
works in the building. So she takes it up to him and
opens it, by the way, because she wants to threaten him with a
lawsuit. Now the lawyer, his name's
Cliff, was played by Glenn Howerton of It's Always Sunny in
Philadelphia. This happens and you think all
are sparks gonna fly between these two, you know?
(05:14):
But but they didn't go that route.
Instead, he just, he's just annoyed by her, if not a little
amused. But this seems like nothing.
But it will. It will end up coming back
later. So everyone at the office finds
out about the breakup and feel bad for her.
But Morgan insists on telling her that a 7th ex has broken up
with him and ended up meeting her future husband.
So Mindy dismisses this at first, but when Morgan shows up
(05:35):
at her door later to console herand she's had a lot of wine, she
decides that hooking up with Morgan just might be the right
move. Before it happens though, she
starts to sober up and realize it's a bad idea and Morgan is a
little hurt. I should say that Morgan did try
to resist her at first, but gavein when she started crying.
So now this is when we get Cliffto re enter the episode.
(05:56):
Morgan has hired him to sue Mindy for sexual harassment,
which quickly goes away when Morgan says he'll drop it if
Mindy agrees to go on an ice dinner date with him, which she
never really does agree to. Jeremy and Danny agree on her
behalf. Now during all this A story, the
B story is the new Doctor Peter Prentice, who was introduced
last episode is working on fitting in with everything.
(06:17):
Danny is the one that has the biggest issue with him,
especially after Peter purposelytouches his penis.
So that's not great. I think it's pretty reasonable
that Danny is upset about this and it leads to them firing him
for about two seconds, but Jeremy decides to give him a
second chance. Now all throughout the episode
it is littered with jokes and clips and clever writing.
Like when Morgan finds out that Casey and Mindy broke up, he
(06:40):
exclaims did he leave you for a white woman?
Glenn Howerton's sarcasm is great, Peter Prentice's
growingness, it all worked really well.
Eventually Mindy and Morgan go on their date and naturally
Mindy adds up enjoying herself and Danny is able to see Peter's
value and Peter's not afraid to do the stuff that they don't
want to, which is apparently a tub births.
I don't know why a water birth is something that they don't
(07:03):
want to do, but whatever. Either way, we end the episode
with Mindy and Cliff clearly being into each other, setting
up a new boyfriend for Mindy. So let's head to the rink.
The rank is where I rank the episode based on five category
story, acting, dialogue, episodecoherence, and character
relatability. I rank it on scale of one to
five, one being the worst and five being the best.
(07:25):
And then we have a laugh counter.
I tally up the amount of times the episode made me laugh out
loud and that gets added to the score.
The first category story, which I gave a 4.25 and I thought this
was a really good story and a relatable 1.
The story is pretty simple too, getting over a breakup.
So there's a bunch of silly story stuff in the middle here,
like Mindy considering sleeping with Morgan because she hopes it
will and meeting someone and Morgan suing her for sexual
(07:48):
harassment. So it's not a 5 because of the
silliness, but it's still quite good.
Let's go to acting, which I gavea 4.25.
I thought everyone was excellentin this.
I mean, there are still moments where it's not great.
Mindy didn't do a great job withcrying and Ike Barinholtz
obviously wasn't perfect with Being Earnest, but it was really
good. Adam Pally clearly seems like
he's going to be a great addition to the cast also.
(08:10):
So dialogue I gave A5 witty and fun and filled with jokes and
laughter. I mean, and this was the type of
writing that we saw a lot in thefirst half of the first half of
the first season. I loved it.
I'm hoping it continues. So let's go to episode
coherence, which I gave a 3.75 S.
The episode coherence was great as far as the characters were
concerned and ultimately was fine as far as story goes, but
(08:32):
it did jump around with it. Cliff the lawyer played by Glenn
Howerton being involved was great, but getting him involved
was pretty flimsy. Not terrible.
You know, it's, it's a sitcom. They don't have a lot of time to
to get these in. So I get it.
Also, Pete's involved everythingto do with Mindy's love life
seems a little earlier even for Mindy, but again, not terrible.
(08:52):
All in all, it was it was reallygood coherence.
So let's go to character relatability, which I gave a
four. It's not higher simply because
Peter Prentice is ridiculous. He's a little hard to relate to
in a similar way to how Morgan was hard to relate to when they
first introduced him. He just feels very caricatury.
But I'm sure with time he'll become a more rounded character
and be easier to relate to. Everyone else was pretty
(09:13):
relatable, especially me. So that gets us to laugh counter
and this episode got me 25 times, which is a good sign for
an episode. You give me that many times
you're going to I mean so if it was just the laugh counter, it
would be in the mediocre category just that.
So that puts the grand total of the episode up to a 46.25 puts
it right into the the meaning oflife tier, which is the highest
(09:36):
tier. As for the series average.
This bumped it into the next tier, increasing it from a 34.7
to a 35.1, which puts it into tothe Holy Grail tier.
So nice job Magic Morgan. So thanks for listening and or
watching everybody. If you'd like to see a list of
our episode and series rankings,you do that on our website at
the rank of John zack.com. Remember to subscribe, review
(09:59):
and comment and send suggestions.
Please consider supporting us onour Patreon site at
patreon.com/the Rank podcast where you can get access to all
the archived episodes. I'll leave you with this.
What did Morgan originally say when Mindy and Cliff got off the
elevator together? Good luck is good luck, Chuck.
(10:20):
That joke was funnier in theory.Maybe it's.
I can't remember now. Looks I can't remember my own
fucking rankings. Hold on.
That's OK. Take your time.
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