Aziz Ansari's 'Master of None' on Netflix

dev says something kind of muddled about how islam is this positive cultural thing for his mom, and what it means to him is getting pulled out of lines by the TSA. and she says, that only happened because you lost your passport three times.

the specific gap i feel like that reflects is a gap in privilege for lack of a better word. american children of immigrants have a whole rights discourse we feel entitled to (as we should) and our parents are like, you're spoiled as fuck.

they're not wrong.

well no, but wanting equality = wanting to be as equally spoilt as everyone else.

(though ofc whether thats a good thing or not is another discussion.. in fact one of the best lines in that ep was when he says 'but im still a good person' which i think is something a lot of non western kids struggle with somewhat, cos western culture does not really encourage that)

StillAdvance, if you mean to say that you wish the episode had been more critical of Islam as a system of beliefs, i think that would be a totally different episode and one Aziz Ansari would not be qualified to/interested in writing.

(that was in response to your earlier post)

neither he nor his mom is wrong in that conversation, though. they just see religious identity differently.

"StillAdvance, if you mean to say that you wish the episode had been more critical of Islam as a system of beliefs, i think that would be a totally different episode and one Aziz Ansari would not be qualified to/interested in writing."

that totally NOT what i wanted.
no idea how you got that.

i just don't really understand your critique.

i was in fact saying his parents should have mounted a better defence against him coming up only with negative associations with islam.

right, but i guess i think there's one of two possibilities

1) they're religious in a p chill way; it's what they were raised with but they're unaccustomed to defending it against attackers because they're not particularly ideologically oriented (a mode of religious identity that is pretty common, i think.)

2) aziz ansari doesn't know much about islam as such or is relatively unfamiliar with the defenses a more devout parent would make in that situation.

i incline to believe it is the former, because i suspect ansari's family is somewhat like the characters his parents play.

because, you don't have to be, like, a sheikh to think eating pork is beyond the pale--most muslims i grew up with found it pretty shocking behavior.

i guess i think you're critiquing the episode on the grounds of implausibility for a couple of moments, but not crediting it for the larger observation it's making about a real thing while maintaining humor and a light touch.

i thought the thrust of that scene was his parents don't really care about that so much as his lack of respect by not maintaining some shared fiction for sake of family (as reiterated in the angela bassett scenes).

right the other piece of that is the importance of keeping up appearances.

but i think it's inaccurate to say they don't care whether dev is muslim or not "for real," just that they read religious identity in large part through those external markers.

tbf his dad doesn't seem to care that much

yeah his dad seems p chill

nah man, he was livid they didn't get to go to that other restaurant.

he cares a lot about food

haha runs in the family

FWIW this is what he said in the vulture piece -

Ansari is not personally religious, and he feels uncomfortable being pointed to as a model Muslim-American, not, he says, because he’s ashamed but because “religious people deserve a better representative than a guy who’s doing a show about fucking and drinking and eating pork all the time.”

....now Ansari finds himself in the tricky position of achieving his peak visibility, after so many years avoiding being typecast, at a time when half of America is thirsting for its Katniss Everdeen — and Ansari, as arguably the most famous Indian guy in the country, and someone whose family is personally affected every time an anti-Muslim screed comes out of the White House, looks the part, whether he wants it or not.

The one everyone will likely be talking about in season two is “Religion,” a lighthearted look at Dev’s efforts to hide his pork-eating habits from his Muslim parents. He’d gotten the idea from watching his dad pretend to be more religious around devout relatives. “It reminded me of that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David pretends to be super-religious so he can get Richard Lewis a kidney,” says Ansari. “I was like, ‘There is a version of that with Islam and no one would believe me.’ ”

Ansari’s own relationship to religion has been complicated. The family practiced Islam at home in South Carolina, but there wasn’t a mosque close by until their father helped build one, after both of his sons were out of the house. The kids learned the tenets in the Quran of being a good person, his parents took them to Mecca as teenagers, but Ansari stopped practicing in college. Everything in the “Religion” episode is based on things that happened in the Ansari family, pre-Trump. “I’m so glad we didn’t say anything (overt),” says Ansari. The better statement, he felt, was to just put his dad, an Indian Muslim doctor who likes Harry Potter and makes dumb jokes about Michael Jordan, on TV. “If every time you see a Muslim person, it’s the fucking guy from 24 or Homeland, yeah, it’s going to shape your opinion of all these people,” he says. “If every time you saw a Muslim person on TV, and it’s my dad, you’ll be like, ‘These goofy people! They’re probably gonna ask me for a bite of my sandwich.’ I don’t think Islamophobic people have hate in their heart. I’m not saying it’s justified, but representation is part of the problem.”

okay i hate aziz ansari's acommodationist tendencies when it comes to bigotry, but i do really appreciate his contribution to the fullness of Muslim identity on tv.

“If every time you saw a Muslim person on TV, and it’s my dad, you’ll be like, ‘These goofy people! They’re probably gonna ask me for a bite of my sandwich.’

Kumail Nanjiani says p much exactly the same thing

giving his dad the best comedic line in the season—the one about things not being where they're supposed to be—was a nice touch

X post - he is a big hearted accommodationist to a fault. It gets a little tiresome.

yeah, I wish this light-hearted comedian spent more time scolding people

the mammy-condom-jar scolding was funny, mostly cuz it was undercut by him waiting until *after* they had sex

I don't think the show is accommodationist! Just his SNL monologue

dev's name is not typically a muslim one. and bhis parents names arent what you would recognise as muslim names either.

I knew Ansari is Muslim but, until the pork episode, I had assumed that Dev Shah came from a Hindu family.

Btw, thanks, horseshoe. That actually helped.

you're welcome! sorry if i sounded defensive and snippy upthread.

wow I did not like the last two episodes of this season at all. Endlessly stretching out that romantic plotline was suuuuuper-tiresome, made me actively irritated by the characters. Bringing Bourdain/Canavalle for the v end distracted a little bit but still oof, not a good way to go out.

i was irritated by the promise of pasta but very little pasta and pasta-making.
less tinder, more tagliatelle!

baffled that anyone would think Chef Jeff is not based on Bourdain - that opening to his show and the voiceover were clearly a direct homage

also, like bourdain, he looms over aziz with drooping arms.

i didn't like the last two episodes, either, but i couldn't tell if i was just being a grump. i just think, though it's a very real thing that we've all experienced, dev's fixation on francesca is a bad idea, and the fact that that storyline is going to continue wearies me. the woman who plays her is great, but i just don't care enough

also the kissing each other through the glass was so cringey--i guess it was supposed to be, but yikes

haha yeah I hated that too. just made me think how silly/melodramatic both were being. Arnold's estimation (that even if it had worked out it "would've been a shitshow") should've been brought up and stressed earlier and saved us 30 minutes of predictable shit.

not watched the whole series yet but ep7 confirms that brian's dad is a better, funnier actor than aziz's dad. seriously, he should be the star of a new jarmusch movie. also BFFS? that sounded like a good show pitch?! it would have been funnier if his idea was worse, and got shot down.

brian's dad is played by an actual actor, while aziz's dad is actually aziz's dad.

clem cheung's been good in a lot of small roles

ah i thought it was all neo-parent-realism

nah he's shown up in Orange is the New Black, Boardwalk Empire, some other stuff

Luke Cage, I think?

high maintenance, the first season of this show

he could be a parent in real life maybe?

you're welcome! sorry if i sounded defensive and snippy upthread.

Np. If you were, I probably deserved it.

I do find it refreshing to see male friendships on screen that aren't defined by insults and ball-busting. not that there's anything inherently wrong with that dynamic in reality but it's pretty much the only thing you ever see on TV

― evol j, Wednesday, 17 May 2017 13:57 (two days ago) Permalink

Good point, I agree

I enjoy this show and will keep watching it but any time o read someone be over reverent I just kinda roll my eyes, it's hit this weird sweet spot of being in the style of prestige tv but with a 90s network drama level depth, but one of the good ones