During an April 2020 interview with Terry Gross on the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air," Mindy Kaling said that the element of the series's plot in which Devi develops temporary paralysis in response to her shock and grief over her father's death was a true story from the real life of the brother of the show's co-creator, Lang Fisher. "When we were talking about the series--there are so many teenage series . . . about love and sex and all of that--and we were both really interested, because we had parents that died unexpectedly, in talking about grief and how grief manifests itself. And [Lang's] brother, after her parents got divorced, had about four months when his legs were paralyzed. And then, all of a sudden, they started working again. And they went to every doctor. They went to every psychologist. And it was this mysterious thing. . . . In researching it, this is something that happens to people, particularly young people, sometimes after trauma. So that was hard to resist as something to talk about. And after she spoke to her brother and got permission, we felt we wanted to use it in the series, because we thought it was a really fascinating physical manifestation of a teenager's grief."
Despite his character Paxton being a high schooler, Darren Barnet was 29 when the first season premiered.
Mindy Kaling approached John McEnroe about narrating before there was even a finished script.
During an April 2020 interview with Vulture, Darren Barnet said that when he first auditioned for his role, the name of the character was just Paxton Hall. But after showrunners Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher overheard Barnet speaking Japanese with assistant director Yuko Ogata, they approached him to ask if they could change an aspect of the character's biography to match his own life: "My mom's Japanese and my grandma spoke to me growing up a little bit, and I took it in school for two years, so if I get a chance to do it, I like to practice it. Lang and Mindy came up to me and were like, 'Were you speaking Japanese with Yuko?' I was worried I was getting in trouble, because we went through this sensitivity training that was like, 'You can't do accents, you can't do impersonations.' But they were like, 'Do you mind if we make your character part Japanese?' That's how Paxton Hall-Yoshida was born."
When the producers reached out to Maitreyi Ramakrishnan about flying to LA for a screen test, she ignored the call -- thinking it was spam -- and they had to email her.