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Keep in mind I don’t do full reviews like this on the site very often, considering I don’t like to write long form reviews. So the fact that I enjoyed Master of None so much so that I’d write this much about it says something about the show…. That being said!
The new Aziz Ansari show Master of None was promising to be a show about a commercial actor searching for love, which wasn’t really interesting to me. I’ve seen the show about funny people trying to show that they have a life outside of their job, but usually it falls flat or seems like it’s trying too hard to be Louie. So when the show was pitched by Netflix was, Aziz Ansari as “a 30-year-old actor in New York who has trouble deciding what he wants to eat, much less the pathway for the rest of his life.” I was extremely turned off. We don’t need another comedian trying to turn their life into a sitcom. We saw how that worked for Jim Jefferies in Legit… Not well!
The marketing for Master of None made me believe that the show had no original vision except for giving a headlining comedian who has had a lot of success as a supporting character a leading role. Even though the first episode was very similar to the original pitch and extremely vanilla as far as content goes… the show quickly develops into something different, unique, and downright fucking funny.
Much to my shagrin, Master of None is much more than just that. Ansari does a great job at letting us into his real life living in New York and the lives of everyone around him. While most of the show is situational comedy and pretty self contained per episode, there’s a nice through story where each episode is loosely connected. Never too much like cancer where the rest of the series is dealing with that, but more like Aziz is having sex with the same person for multiple episodes or the movie he’s acting in.
For example, the episode “Indians on TV” delves into the troubles of being Indian, he’s against playing up the Indian accent when he goes out for roles like Nameless Cab Driver or Store Clerk. While at the same time his friend who is also an Indian actor doesn’t care and until Aziz mentioned that the Indian guy from Short Circuit was actually a white guy in brown face, he’d never realize how fucked it is to be Indian. So when Aziz gets wrongly looped in to an email chain where a TV exec is making racist remarks towards Aziz, they’re put in the position to either ignore it or put the racism on blast.
The show was some wicked funny moments that really made me feel it was both laugh out loud funny and extremely clever. I really like the group of friends that Aziz has throughout the show, including Eric Wareheim from Tim and Eric. They help stir the show up and keep Aziz interesting. There’s an episode titled “Nashville” where his friends help him decide that the perfect first date for him to wow this girl is to take her on a weekend trip to Nashville, TN. The entire episode keeps seesawing between “that would be fucking creepy” to “they seem really great together”.
I binge watched the first half of the season and can safely say almost every episode had something I really liked and easily re-watchable. The fact that the original marketing for the show was a light and fluffy comedian series was such a let down that I had to check it out to see how corny it was going to be. But because of that I was given the opportunity to be delighted and surprised by an original work of comedy. So for that, Netflix, I say bravo.
True that Eric, thumbs up indeed.
