The Late Night trail­er shakes up a hide­bound talk show institution

The dev­il no longer wears Pra­da; these days, she’s grin­ning through celebri­ty inter­views and deliv­er­ing one-lin­ers on tele­vi­sion some­time around midnight.

Emma Thomp­son and Mindy Kaling​’s char­ac­ters have a dis­tinct­ly Priest­ly-Sachs rela­tion­ship in the new­ly unveiled trail­er for the work­place com­e­dy Late Night, as a novice grad­u­al­ly earns the respect of her bul­ly­ing, elite mentor.

Thomp­son por­trays a talk show per­son­al­i­ty who’s a leg­end in the indus­try, but los­ing her foot­ing at the net­work as they decide to skew younger and sharp­er. Kaling (who also penned the film’s script) is the new blood inject­ed into the writ­ing staff to bring some fresh per­spec­tive as the lone woman of col­or in a room filled with men of vary­ing lev­els of whiteness.

Of course, there’s some fric­tion at first – just look at how our lov­ably awk­ward hero­ine upends a full trash can instead of deign­ing to sit in some­one else’s seat! – but both char­ac­ters grow on one anoth­er. Kaling’s ner­vous-nel­lie Mol­ly Patel finds con­fi­dence enough to pipe up dur­ing pho­to ops, while Thompson’s haughty Kather­ine New­bury learns not to be so mean to every­one all the time.

Fol­low­ing through on the film’s stat­ed empha­sis on diver­si­ty, the director’s chair was filled by one Nisha Gana­tra, an indie stal­wart and TV vet find­ing her biggest plat­form yet with this wide­ly tout­ed Sun­dance sen­sa­tion. Dis­trib­u­tor Ama­zon ponied up a whop­ping $13 mil­lion out of the fes­ti­val for the picture’s dis­tri­b­u­tion rights; months from the release, and it’s already Ganatra’s biggest film.

The beats of the film seem to have laid them­selves out pret­ty plain­ly, but as a life­long fan of the rom-com, Kaling knows just how far exe­cut­ing the pre­dictable with finesse and good humor can go.

Late Night comes to the­aters in the US and UK on 7 June.