The great love story of Master of None starts, like so many great love stories, with the guy saying, “Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck!” as he realizes the condom broke.
From there, a hot date takes a pause as these crazy kids, on a first date gone in an interesting direction, pull out (their phones, I mean) to Google whether or not “those little guys that come out before the big party” can get you pregnant, to a late-night Uber ride — Uber X is fine, it’s only three minutes away — to the pharmacy to pick up Plan B and Martinelli’s apple juice. “Please, I got it,” he says as she takes out her wallet. “My treat.”
Master of None, Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang’s new Netflix comedy, premiered Friday. (All ten episodes of the debut season were made available at midnight.) It is fantastic. Thoughtful, witty, generous, sweet — the kind of first date that keeps you checking your phone in the hopes that the second date is coming soon.
Dev (Ansari) is an actor in New York, whom we first meet in bed with Rachel (Noël Wells) and later see awaiting his big break and hanging around with his friends (Kelvin Yu, Lena Waithe, Eric Wareheim). He contemplates life questions, big — Is this relationship the forever relationship? — and small — Is this taco truck the best taco truck? — as he goes on auditions, dates, adventures, and misadventures. For anyone used to the joke density of a Tina Fey/Robert Carlock creation, Master will seem particularly unhurried. Lines get space to breathe; characters are clever, but in a believable, flawed way. This pointedly modern show, in terms of its subject matter, is retro in its structure and tone, with its ‘70s-style credits and its leisurely pace.
Episodes are about evenly divided between a more serialized storyline of Dev and Rachel’s relationships and one-offs that act as ruminations on, it seems, everything that’s interesting to Ansari and Yang: the immigrant and child-of-an-immigrant experience, moving in with your significant other, FOMO, foodies, infidelity, sexism, trying to make it as an actor of Asian descent when you aren’t sure how to feel about doing “the accent” and/or only playing cab drivers, marriage, children.
Ansari is best known for his work as the hyperactive technophile he played on Parks and Recreation and his stand-up, which lately has been a high-energy exploration of dating, sex, and technology. The go-to thing to say — already! And the show’s only been out for, like, 12 hours! — is that Master of None is his Louie. But I think Ansari and Yang have created their own, neat, occasionally strange thing here. Master does, though, fit into this space of which Louie is a part: this comedy-as-auteur world, where a series takes shape around the visionary behind it instead of a comic bending, Gumby-style, to fit into a sitcom slot. Lena Dunham is at it with Girls, to name an obvious analogue, but, even though the style and tone is different, it’s also what Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are doing on Broad City and what Amy Schumer has done with Inside Amy Schumer (a series which was originally supposed to be a sex talk show until Jessi Klein, now the IAS head writer, told Schumer “this could be your Louie”).
In Master, Ansari has crafted a role for himself that, as the show often points out, no one else would have ever written for him. One audition crumbles when Dev is asked to do “the accent,” even though it makes no sense for the character. Another audition for a buddy-comedy sitcom goes well, but Dev finds out that a producer liked his and another Indian actor’s readings — which would be fine and all, but “There can’t be two.” (“Let’s meet them both,” another email in the chain says, “and see who can curry our favor.”)
The series doesn’t shy away from these Big Cultural Statements, but it makes them in the way you might make them while getting into it with your friends over a few drinks. It’s important, it’s everything, it’s infuriating as hell, you could argue about it forever, but then you move on because you want to get tacos.
Master is a show about being a millennial that will not make millennials cringe or give non-millennials more reasons to criticize a much-maligned generation — no small feat. And maybe that is because it has this undercurrent of enthusiasm; you get the feeling, watching it, that Ansari and Yang kind of can’t believe they’re getting away with this, with making a show so attuned to their particular sensibilities and tastes, so focused on the subjects that resonate so deeply with them. Ansari got to cast his own parents to play his parents, for crying out loud. He gets, like, five amazing make-out scenes in ten episodes.
In the midst of one of those scenes, Dev comes up for air to say, “Can we just take a moment to acknowledge how cool this is?” We sure can.