First things first. In hindsight, the fact that I didn’t name this blog Master of None back when I started it is a great personal failure. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the name Roused to Mediocrity, but Master of None would have been perfect.
What am I if not a jack of all (or at least many) cultural trades, but master of none? What is this blog if not proof that I know more than the average person about a lot of mediums and genres, but never enough to claim mastery, or say, teach a class, or be gainfully employed in the field?
So, as well as I relate to the show’s title, I’m aware that part of what I love about Master of None is that Aziz ticks all the right boxes for me.
The way the show depicts a passion for flavor and adventure is familiar to me. I feel a deep kinship with a character who charges head first down the rabbit hole of any given interest or hobby, or who needs to do internet research to find the best tacos or burgers or ramen or ice cream before choosing where to eat. I see parts of myself in Dev, a character perpetually curious about interesting things and new experiences.
To put it another way, I feel at home in the show’s eccentricities — they’re common eccentricities, no doubt, but they’re eccentricities all the same. If I had the money Dev does, I would live a very similar life, minus all the frustrating dating. I want to live in his apartment, I want to wear his clothes, I want to eat every meal he eats.
That being said, my appreciation for Master of None can’t be summed up in my desire to live the good life. Far more than that, I love that the show is full of sincere personal storytelling from Aziz and co-creator Alan Yang. The details may not be purely autobiographical — although at times they seem to get pretty close — but the themes and overall feeling of the show seem to reveal a part of themselves in a very real way. The show engages themes of identity, family, culture, race, passion, vocation, and relationships, and always with vulnerability, honesty, and tenderness. Add to that a style that is fresh, inventive, and ambitious, and you have a winning formula.
The show is aesthetically and structurally bold, but the bolder moves always work. Like when they spent one of the season’s ten episodes writing a love letter to New York, skipping the show’s primary characters for 10% of the season! [Also, that they spent a chunk of that episode in total silence!] Or when they veer off of Dev’s trajectory for a flashback episode focusing on Denise and the story of her family as they learn to accept that she’s gay — a definite highlight of the season for me. Or kicking off season two with a black and white episode-long homage to Bicycle Thieves (aka The Bicycle Thief, aka Ladri di biciclette), a film you should watch right away if you’ve never seen it.
Those are bold choices, but they fit right in tonally on Master of None. The “New York, I Love You,” episode works because New York has been a character on the show all along. “Thanksgiving” fits, in part, because it’s so tonally consistent with the other episodes. “The Thief” works because, while Dev is taking this deep dive into Italian culture, of course he would start seeing his life as Italian neorealist cinema. And all three work because the episodes fit so well thematically. Master of None is always about how bittersweet it is to be a human, constantly dealing with all the ordinary bullshit and beauty that comes along with being alive.
Master of None is an impressively well-made show. Even more than season one, season two is full of impressive moments of style and craft. Satisfyingly, these moments are used as a tool for storytelling. Any moment where I thought, “Oh, this is a really cool shot,” it was always in service of the story. It’s never empty style.
Anyway, you should definitely watch Master of None if you aren’t yet, even if it turns out we never get a third season.
