Written by Katherine Murray.
If you haven’t had time to catch up on Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series yet, prepare yourself to be delighted.
Ever since it dropped in November, Master of None — created by Ansari and Alan Yang — has racked up critical praise. The comedy follows Ansari’s character, Dev, as he navigates his dating life and fledgling acting career in New York City. But what sets it apart is the diversity of its characters, and the insight it offers into day-to-day microaggressions related to race and gender. Master of None offers us a point of view that’s hard to find on television, and does it in a smart, entertaining way.
One of the episodes that has attracted the most attention is “Parents,” which focuses on first-generation Americans trying to navigate relationships with their immigrant parents. Ansari cast his real-life mother and father in the episode, and the story struck a powerful chord with viewers who had never before seen their own experiences as children of immigrants reflected in popular entertainment. Another episode, “Indians on TV,” highlights racist stereotypes and casting in mainstream media, calling out real-life examples, both obvious and subtle.
Master of None has received less attention for the way it approaches gender, but the first season shines on that front, too. Dev’s group of friends includes funny, smart people from many different backgrounds, including a straight white man and a Black lesbian woman who have roughly equal importance in the story. His relationship with his one-night stand turned girlfriend, Rachel, is respectful and emotionally mature – they act like equals at all times, and like each other because they have the same sense of humor, interests, and values. In the episode “Hot Ticket,” Dev agonizes over setting up a date with a really attractive waitress, only to discover that he hates her personality. It’s an idea that could have gone wrong, but the character and her awful personality idiosyncrasies are so specific that it doesn’t come off as a statement that beautiful women are X, Y or Z, so much as a statement that it’s not possible to know whether someone is a desirable date until you’ve spent time talking to them.
The most feminist episode of the first season, though, is “Ladies and Gentlemen,” in which Dev is surprised to learn that his girlfriend and female friends are constantly the targets of aggressive behavior from men. Like “Indians on TV,” “Ladies and Gentlemen” starts by highlighting broad, obvious forms of aggression, before drawing attention to subtler types of discrimination that even well-meaning people engage in.
“Ladies and Gentlemen” opens with a scene that cuts back and forth between Dev and one of his female co-stars leaving a cast party at night. Dev and his male friend, Arnold, share a pleasant conversation and cut through the park to save time. Dev’s co-star looks like she’s in a horror movie and ends up getting followed to her house by some asshole who tried to buy her a drink earlier and got mad when she turned him down. He hammers on her door demanding to know why nice guys like him never have a chance.
After Dev finds out about what happened, he hears similar stories from all the other women in his life. The stories are based on the real-life experiences of female staff writers, and they’re completely familiar to any woman watching the show, right down to the detail where you can’t post a picture of eggs on your Instagram without some strange guy showing up to harass you.
Armed with this new information, Dev and his female friend, Denise, make a citizen’s arrest when they catch a man jerking off on the subway. Dev becomes a hero to all the women at the bar, who start buying him drinks and telling him about the awful things that guys have done to them. Later on, while he’s still basking in the glow of being an upstanding feminist, one of Dev’s male coworkers stops by the table and introduces himself to all the men, while ignoring the women completely. Rachel and Denise point out the sexism of the situation and Dev dismissively tells them that they are being too sensitive and making a big deal out of nothing. He’s then confused about why Rachel is upset with him.
What follows is an amazing scene – also based on real-life experiences – where Rachel and Dev walk home together and she explains in an articulate but believable way, why it’s hurtful and offensive for him to tell her that her own assessment of a thing that just happened to her is wrong. It’s like the final scene in the Louie episode “So Did the Fat Lady,” except without being so problematic. In the end, Dev concedes that Rachel knows more about what Rachel just experienced than he does, and says he will try harder to listen, from now on.
It’s one of the single greatest moments I’ve seen on a TV show – and maybe the only one to directly address this exact, frustrating, aggravating, hard-to-articulate issue head-on. You don’t have to look further than the comments section on any website to see that people with more power routinely try to decide what people with less power have the right to complain about. That very act – that presumptuous attempt to unilaterally define the boundaries of what is and isn’t up for discussion; what we can and can’t feel offended by; what we can and can’t disagree about – that very act is, itself, an attempt to protect and reinforce the power structures we were trying to complain about in the first place. It’s something that happens in every discussion about inequality, but it’s so rare for that to be the topic itself that I was actually shocked when it was in “Ladies and Gentlemen.”
Non-traditional networks like Netflix and Amazon have opened new frontiers in terms of what a TV show can be and whose stories are profitable enough to be worth telling. Master of None is an example of the very best these new frontiers have to offer – a funny, insightful, well-produced series that broadens the range of experiences depicted on television and adds something new to the cultural discussion.
The good news is that Master of None was just officially renewed for second season, expected to show up in 2017.
Staff writer Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.