Master of None Review
2015Aziz Ansari and Alan YangTV Show
Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang's comedy grew bolder every season, from an observant New York sitcom to a Bergman homage on 16mm, and most risks paid off.
| Category | Critic | Users |
|---|---|---|
| Plot | Good | |
| Cinematography | Great | |
| Acting | Good | |
| Dialogue | Great | |
| Overall | Great |
The first season is a loose, observant comedy about Dev Shah, a New York actor best known for a Go-Gurt commercial, and its best episodes are about other people. The episode Parents, in which Dev and his friend Brian learn what their immigrant parents gave up, cast Ansari's real parents as Dev's and won Ansari and Yang the Emmy for comedy writing.
The second season opens in Modena, where Dev is learning to make pasta, with a black and white homage to Bicycle Thieves, then borrows from Antonioni and Fellini. One episode drops Dev for a doorman, a deaf woman and a Burundian cab driver; Thanksgiving, written by Ansari and Lena Waithe, follows Denise's coming out across two decades of family dinners, with Angela Bassett as her mother, and made Waithe the first Black woman to win the Emmy for comedy writing.
Moments in Love (2021) hands the show to Waithe's Denise and Naomi Ackie's Alicia: five episodes about a marriage, shot on 16mm in a boxy frame by a camera that barely moves, in open homage to Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. It is slow, and Ackie is superb. Ansari's own performance is the plainest thing in the first two seasons, though it won him a Golden Globe; as a director he kept getting better.
Master of None at a glance
- Network
- Netflix
- Showrunner
- Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang
- Year
- 2015
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