Aziz Ansari's 'Master of None' on Netflix

lol @ kids yelling out ethnicities

I've heard it described as Ansari's Louie

Kiss of death

ansari's career thus far has been so based in superficiality and and mainstream-y punchlines (kanye, rkelly, foodie shit) that his whole "thing" is a huge turn off to me.

his material is p vapid but there is something there imo

looking forward to this

ansari's career thus far has been so based in superficiality and and mainstream-y punchlines (kanye, rkelly, foodie shit)

This sounds far more like what he was doing in stand-up five years ago than what he might be doing now - I last saw him in 2013, but I saw him play to theatres of thousands and unannounced in a basement at 1am, and he was doing introspective material and extensive crowdwork about relationships each time that year.

His acting has been different along the way, too, and Human Giant was far more absurdist than Kanye/Kells references.

i saw his love guru/relationship set and that came off as smug and d-baggy to me idk.

his relationship book is way better than it needed to be and made me admire him

have never seen his standup though

as someone whos found him sometimes funny, mostly vapid and lightweight, this trailer actually looks good, like hes actually going to be looking at 'real' stuff for once, not fluff. as his shows have gotten bigger, he seems to have gotten *more* superficial and lightweight, while trying to appear to be 'introspective' (give me funny over that any day), so this show is welcome.

this is like louie def, w a character ~15 yrs younger and more outgoing and slightly more likeable

its good ive always dug aziz

i like this show

I just watched the first 7 with my sister lol

It's good! not mindblowingly amazing like some are saying but definitely good. a lot like Louie except w/ a higher budget and Aziz's topical concerns (I noticed they have a producer in common, not to mention some of the same performers). Some of it is a little pat (esp the gender disparity stuff) but that's to be expected in a first season. Eric Wareheim is a great foil for Aziz, more than I was expecting, and not only because he's twice his size, though that helps

Enjoyed the first two episodes, got a few genuine laughs out of it.

The Dad-bonding stuff was pretty sweet (maybe over-egged at times) but also interesting and those flashbacks were really well done.

Didn't like so much the weird plugging of Sherlock.

So far i'd say this is easily the best thing he's done. Really enjoyable.

Aziz owes a huge debt to Hedberg. I wish Mitch was still around to do a series like this.

Just finished. Really enjoyed it, thought it was nice and relatively low key and not too awkward.

Didn't like so much the weird plugging of Sherlock.

read this as "weird pegging of Sherlock," actual show will now be a huge disappointment

It's a Kevin Smith movie in Brooklyn instead of New Jersey.

read this as "weird pegging of Sherlock," actual show will now be a huge disappointment

this ain't Broad City yo

C- troll whiney

Has kevin smith ever put a nonwhite person in a movie or written a decent joke?

The Claire Danes one seemed out of step with previous, too cliched and coincidence-dependent.

Has kevin smith ever put a nonwhite person in a movie or written a decent joke?
--Οὖτις

There's.... Not a lot of jokes in this?

There are a lot of the kind of jokes that make you do the nasally "humph!", kind of like the humor column in the new yorker would do if it was better.

Two episodes in, I really like this show so far. Second episode (parents) much better than first, I think

Has kevin smith ever put a nonwhite person in a movie or written a decent joke?

Chris Rock in the Catholic movie is one of the funnier characters in his oeuvre. Not sure if CR wrote all his own jokes in that.

anyway having caught the whole thing now, I'm sticking to "good," not great. I felt like he played it pretty safe this season, more sitcom-y beats than I was expecting. a little surprised to see James Ponsoldt's name come up, and sad to see Harris Wittel's.

My roommate pointed out that a lot of this is like a christian sitcom

I don't know about that. Its view of marriage/domesticity is considerably more ambivalent than, say, the Apatow shit.

Whats a christian sitcom

book of job

Dunno what a christian sitcom is

just seems kind of christian

Honour thy parents (by casting them as thy character's parents in thy show)

http://www.themoviescene.co.uk/reviews/_img/153-2.jpg

aziz's dad is so wonderful in this show tbh

He is, and he reminds me a lot of a couple of eccentric Indian dads I know. The parents episode is one of the most charming things I've seen in ages.

Oh man, this is so good! I'm about to start the fourth episode.

Like, it's a level of enjoyment that makes me not even hate Eric Wareheim.

Aw, Eric is good. Though Tim might be a little better at this sort of thing.

Bearded guy seems like they wrote it for Brian Posehn then couldn't get him.

good start, stopped watching once it turned into emo relationship without any jokes

I like Ansari but the uptalk inflection he does at the end of a sentence can be grating.

Just finished the Nashville episode. That was my favorite episode yet and had some great character-dependent jokes (like, ordinarily doing the voice of a ghost koala would be stupid, but in context it was funny and charming). Didn't find it emo at all, but maybe that's still to come.

Just watched the first 3 episodes, decent so far but more muted chuckles than laffs

I don't get a moralizing tone from this at all - agree it seems much more ambivalent about domesticity than Apatow and co. The opposing fantasies of having children in that one episode were lol funny, I liked how Aziz's ideal parenthood scenario looked like it was set in 1965.

Also agree Parents episode was incredible. All of the ethnicity/race stuff seems very well done - I lol'd at "Is Mindy Kaling real?"

I thought all the parents were hilarious. His mom's caustic facial expressions were great.

just watched the whole thing. firs episode i thought was sort of terrible - it felt like that was a rehearsal almost, like it wasnt even written or the actors hadnt even worked together until someone started filming. but it gets progressively better. last episode is actually really great (though maybe just because his concerns almost exactly mirror my own). the parents and indian casting ones are brilliant. though oddly, in the guardian review it talks about how the show is so great cos its about how there are next to no white people in it, and the show is about inter-ethnic relationships, which is kinda true, and what makes it novel actually, but white people have pretty significant roles in this... like.... his girlfriend! and apart from the indian casting episode, there are no other south asian ppl in this except his parents, which strikes me as... interesting. its not really a comedy series though, forget what people are saying. its basically just a US indie drama, delivered in a slightly 'funny' tone. like how i feel when i watch a lot of modern american indies. the tone is that of a comedy/dramedy but there arent many jokes, or funny scenarios. which is bit of a problem with AA in general - his lines often feel like jokes, but the actual joke doesnt come. i wonder if the series would have worked better as one indie movie, but its a good first series. and the first real US series presented from a south asian perspetive (apart from mindy obv) as far as i know...

did anyone else think in that episode about the father john misty show, that the 'smoking hot' barmaid alice wasnt actually all that smoking hot?

also, soneone needs to broaden AA's taste in tv and movies.

I think she was just tall which when you are as short as Aziz is probably = hot.

“being a creep”

should've named the special "Aziz Ansari: Too Horny for TV"

i don't doubt that he was being a creep in ways that are basically at the micro aggression level and ones that women are probably sick of dealing with, but i think if this piece was less a piece which seemed centered on him being a creepy celeb that needed to be called out but rather a story about a date with someone unnamed (maybe going as far as an "unnamed celebrity") and what a woman might deal with on a date with men, things that the guy might think are cool but women are kind of bothered and pressured by, it might be better. i say this though based on my memory of the piece from just a single read and i'm not a woman let alone this particular woman so idk...

master of shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqh6yZaRNI

Damn, looks hilarious, the king is back

Prefer the Art of Noise myself

new season centers on lena waithe's character and the disintegration of her marriage. i thought this was a bold and interesting decision and found the writing and acting painfully realistic, especially the (deserved but still searing) hostility of lena's ex once she decided she was "done." the farmhouse setting was great, how quaintness slides into claustrophobia, like the built space was putting pressure on the relationship.

anyway, apparently people don't like lena waithe because they find her work "Black trauma porn." the tweet from the official slate account was even harsher than this, stating "From sensationalizing Black trauma to coddling alleged harassers, Lena Waithe has a lot to answer for."

https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/lena-waithe-controversy-master-of-none.html

is this remotely fair? the core critique seems interesting -- looking at, you know, what kinds of stories get told, how something that tries to be a representation of something painful and true can end up inadvertantly reproducing a harmful stereotype -- but literally if you search 'lena waithe' on twitter people are using words like "accountability" to describe what seem to be artistic differences between her and certain members of her audience.

what kind of culture is this we are building?

i get ppl's suspicions of her writing. i saw queen & slim in the theater and really enjoyed it until i thought harder about a few tropes it employs without really interrogating them (cf. the scene of the good black cop letting them get away)

fundamentally down with cord jefferson getting more work even though i do not like this show and am unlikely to watch this (admittedly intriguing) season

i haven't seen queen and slim or them, but the critique presented seemed plausible. my problem was with the rhetoric of the piece, like especially the implication that she should "answer for" failing to "uplift" her audience in certain ways. also, those critiques aren't really salient to this season, which isn't about violence or trauma, so the piece felt like a drive-by character assassination.

this kind of passage:

Of course Lena Waithe, purveyor of failing to protect Black bodies on-screen and off, would be cool with having a Black character’s life ruined for being Black, and in such an unflinchingly awful way.

like, the way she handled misconduct allegations on the set of the chi is a real issue about real behavior in the world. i don't know enough about that to speak to it, but it's weird to mix up that kind of thing with fictional events in her movies.

i think the piece is both unfair and fair, by which i mean that sentence rankled for me as well. i didn't know about the chi stuff and idk it pretty blatantly sucks

but that seems more indicative of how the industry protects abusers than it does a strain of anti-blackness running through waithe's work

really original opinion i'm dropping here but i also just really hate it whenever anyone refers to themselves or others as a "creative"

I’ll take “a creative” over “a creator” 10 times out of 10

a creator has a master plan

I haven’t read slate since maybe the GWB administration, is it just a hot take “this person is terrible and here’s why” factory now?

honestly its reputation for the past 15 years has been “a hot take factory” cf. there’s probably a “invent a fake slate headline” thread on here

I'm not really going to talk to any of that apart from to say that the sentence treeship quoted is gross, in my opinion, and is designed to attract more attention to the writer than to the subject, so to speak. Thanks for linking that, though.

As someone with very mixed feelings about MoN (s1, s2) occasionally liking it, often hating it, I have to say that this series is STUNNING. It's not faultless but it's an incredible achievement and is so skilled. If I had to pick it apart for slight niggles I could but I shan't, at this point. There are a lot of quietly great things in here and I'd recommend it even if you had not liked the show before. It's interesting to watch as parenthesis to what's gone before because it bears little relation to what's gone before stylistically or subjectively. I'm surprised at how deeply felt it was, how closely observed it was and how rigorous it was.

Thanks for linking that, though.

That wasn't sarcasm, btw.

I agree. This season is better than most of the reviews seem to suggest. The “fly on the wall” filming style, with the camera sometimes seeming to be outside a doorframe, was very effective, encouraging close observation of the characters. And the performances of the two leads were both great.

The performances are really great, particularly Naomi Ackie. There are some beautiful photographic tableaus as inserts. I dare say someone who knows more than I do could tell us that that doorframe framing device comes from Bergaman, or whatever.

I was really very moved by the performance of the nurse, Cordelia, at the clinic, who seems to be a real nurse, as far as I can tell. I doubt a nurse at an IVF clinic would be allowed to tell a patient that it was "really going to work" tho but I can forgive that.

I mean the nurse, Codelia, really does stand out. Cordelia talking about Alicia's socks seems to me to be *the eye of the duck* of this series.

Oh, and I meant to say that I agreed with your initial post/revive, treeship, I just got caught up in the horrible slate thing.

Also, there's an "oh, fuck" at the end of this which is so casual that it's impressive.

I am reading that Slate piece right now and that "offensive" line was a (somewhat glib) characterization of the online reaction to Waithe's involvement in "Them" and not a direct description of her and her work, particularly given the context in which it appears.

My main takeaway is that some of you read for outrage rather than comprehension.

around the time Them was about to launch on Amazon I saw a lot of slms against Waithe on Twitter circulating around two main areas: 1) claims that she was no longer very original and 2) the 'black torture porn' aspect of something that happens in Them (which I didn't watch, in part because of the description of that scene). But she was responsible for one of the best half hours of TV in recent memory (the thanksgiving episode of MoN) and I really liked Queen and Slim. I only saw season 1 of the Chi which I thought was good. So I'm willing to cut her some slack and I don't know that she is to blame for how Amazon decided to market Them (which made it look like a mockbuster of Us).

have not read that article. Have tried watching Master of None, The Chi and Twenties and didn't like any of them; deduced from that experience that Waithe's work is not for me.

I seem to be in the minority as someone who greatly enjoyed the two first seasons of MoN (especially the second one). Wasnt expecting this type of depth from Aziz Ansari. Does his character even take part in this new season?

2 scenes only, and the first one is a real barn-burner.

watched the first three of this last night, I agree it is very good. I can see why some people are disappointed; it does draw things out, you get very very long scenes of, basically, nothing happening (folding laundry, eating a sandwich), but if you have tolerance for that sort of thing its worth it.

We watched ep 2 last night and immediately started fast forwarding, knowing that the opening scene would consist of the entire song + entire sandwich

the only thing I remember about s2 was wishing eric wareheim would stick to directing

I absolutely cannot relate to this impatience people are expressing with scenes that unfold slowly and carefully. Life is already much, much too fast and most shows are unwatchable because they move even more quickly.

Also the unimportant details in ep2 made no sense. Doesn't matter for the story I guess but it was driving me crazy.

-Denise's friend/hook-up said she was too drunk to drive home, implying that she had driven there. So was Denise driving her home in the friend's car? How did she plan to get home?

-Also the car accident was staged extremely randomly. And the friend was on the passenger side, where the other car plowed into. No word about what happened to her?

-Why would she have left her underwear lying on the floor...like, they showed her getting dressed, you would think she would notice that when she put on her jeans?

-This is silly but Denise offers her cookies, the friend eventually says 'sure, go put them in the oven', and then makes fun of her for having Tollhouse dough. Wtf who assumes that when someone offers them cookies, they're talking about (homemade) dough that they are about to go bake, as opposed to already baked or bought cookies?!

So far I keep going back and forth about whether this is deeply felt & observed material or bullshit that deeply wishes it was serious art.

The disappearance of the “friend” was weird to me too. I guess a Femme Fatale can never really die.

lol

(oops, sorry about messing up my spoiler text, oh well)

They also never dealt with who naomi ackie’s character had slept with. I wonder if she even cheated or just made it up to even the score—resist casting herself as the more innocent, sensitive one...

Just saw that that actress is only 28. She does a good job playing someone a decade older. Very emotionally plausible

i don't really remember a huge amount about season 2 other than that I liked it and I got sick of Aziz saying "allora" and there was a pretty Italian woman.

finished this last night. Its very good but I can see how people would be disappointed at lack of firm resolution. It does wind up being a study of Naomi Acker's character more than anything else; I could have done with one more episode focused on Denise.

the IVF episode is incredible.