The disgraced actor who allegedly wouldn’t stop saying “oh, my vagina” at work has a new job. So who’s the lucky cast that gets to put up with Jeff Garlin’s raunchy punch-ups? Well, Never Have I Ever won’t be able to claim “hired Jeff Garlin” as something it’s never done. Garlin is jumping from his cushy gig on The Goldbergs, where he’s collected residuals on 205 episodes, for Mindy Kaling’s Never Have I Ever fourth season on Netflix.
After multiple complaints and internal investigations, Garlin and Sony Television made the mutually beneficial decision to spare the Goldbergs’ cast and crew from anymore Garlin. “There has been an HR investigation on me the past three years,” Garlin told Vanity Fair in 2021. “HR has come to me three years in a row for my behavior on set.” So the cast and crew of The Goldbergs won’t have Garlin to complain about anymore, nor will they have to continue hearing genuine apologies like “[A]s a comedian, if somebody is offended by what I say, all I can say is, I’m sorry. OK?” Or, as Garlin’s former co-star Wendi McLendon-Covey put it on Twitter: “This season threw us for a loop because a.) it’s hard to incorporate someone who doesn’t want to be there and wants to leave mid-scene, and b.) we weren’t about to re-write the 2nd half of the season.”
So the show gave Garlin his wish, and his character was killed off the show, and so the production went through the trouble of adding a horrific digital Jeff Garlin to the show’s wedding episode. Crawling straight out of the pits of the uncanny valley, Garlin 2.0 has haunted the nightmares of television viewers ever since, sneaking into their dreams and shouting “oh, my vagina” at them.
And like the sleeping children hoping that the Sandman won’t conjure Garlin, Never Have I Ever can now count the actor as their problem. According to Variety, Garlin will play, what else, “a sweet man who fixes a mean sandwich.” What can we say? He was simply the only person who could bring that role to life.
