Aziz Ansari's 'Master of None' on Netflix

think I made it 15

I made it all the way through halfway paying attention... the last bit (dying grandma is so thankful, as we should all be blah blah blah) was enraging.

Enraging? Ok

Facebook motivational memes are not good comedy.

I wouldnt know

all of the sentimental family stuff just came off as a hedge against the other stuff he doesn't want to really talk about.

Finding these reactions bizarre (esp the rage) but whatever. Cant argue ppl into finding things funny or moving

yeah, I did definitely say aloud "oh, 60 more times of seeing my parents is waaaaaay too much."

Lol

I don’t think you paid attention to the grandma part of that was your takeaway

My actual takeaway (and the part that was annoying) was that it was a shield to cover his primary sentiment of "I'm so thankful my cancellation for being a creep was only temporary."

Should he not be thankful about that?

Full disclosure - i found the “accusations” against him p weak sauce, publicized by a questionable outlet

Essentially if u think he shouldnt be onstage at all because of his “crimes” then i would think there’s nothing he could say onstage that will alter that

yeah, I did definitely say aloud "oh, 60 more times of seeing my parents is waaaaaay too much."

looooool

I don't particularly care about him being onstage - cool scare quotes around crimes though.

All the #blessed shit just felt like the worst of self-serving Louis CK "comedy but real talk" as discussed earlier in the thread. Preachy comedy sucks.

He was not charged w a crime, thats why the scarequotes

There shouldn't even be scare quotes around "crimes" because his actions weren't criminal. His behaviour wasn't even tortious. I am surprised that this is even still an issue, I thought that consensus was clearly on Aziz's side? Juliana Escabedo Shepherd wrote that Jezebel piece? I myself went so far as to agree with Caitlin Flanagan's take (i.e. that it was actually racist?) https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-humiliation-of-aziz-ansari/550541/

Exactly

Literally no one had referred to him as doing anything remotely heinous or criminal - which is why bringing them up in scare quotes as if someone had was weird.

“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?