[For this year’s
April
Fool’s series, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of recent comic TV
shows. Share your thoughts on these or other televised
foolishness, present or past, in comments!]
On what’s groundbreaking
about Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series,
what’s not, and what to do with that gap.
Master of None isn’t the first, nor the only
current, sitcom to focus on an Asian American protagonist: there are historical
examples such as Pat Morita’s very short-lived Mr. T and Tina
(1976) and Margaret Cho’s one-season All-American Girl
(1994); and ongoing contemporary shows like Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project
and Eddie Huang’s Fresh off the Boat. But
at its best, as in the two early Season 1 episodes “Parents” (episode 2) and
“Indians on TV”
(episode 4), Ansari’s show explores elements of the multi-generational,
immigrant, multi-cultural, professional, familial, and everyday Asian American
experience with a combination of humor and nuance that I’d never before encountered
on American TV (much less in a sitcom). Foregrounded as they are toward the
start of the show’s first season, those two groundbreaking episodes make clear
that Master of None isn’t just a show
featuring an Asian American lead (and his Asian American best friend Brian [Kelvin Yu])—they announce
a sitcom unafraid to examine issues of race, ethnicity, culture, and identity
with realism and intelligence.
Unfortunately,
with the exception of an episode (“Ladies and Gentlemen”)
focused on the issue of misogyny in American society and popular culture, the
first season’s remaining six episodes didn’t live up to the promise of those
edgy early eps. Instead, the bulk of the season’s second half was dedicated to
the romantic trials and tribulations of Ansari’s Dev and his girlfriend Rachel
(Noël Wells), which
while both entertaining and realistic didn’t feel particularly distinct from
(to name one particularly famous example) those experienced by a different Rachel with her very
on-again/off-again boyfriend Ross. Or indeed any number of other sitcom
romances—the fact that I could have used literally countless analogies to
conclude that last sentence make clear just how central romantic trials and
tribulations have been to the genre. Even a rule-breaking sitcom like Seinfeld consistently featured
relationship struggles for all of its main characters (other than perhaps
Kramer, whose most confusing relationship was of course with himself). In its
reliance on the Dev-Rachel dynamic to propel its season-long plot, then, Master of None was as typical of TV
sitcoms as those early episodes were unique.
So what do we do
with that frustrating duality? (Or, if not frustrating, at least striking,
especially if you binge-watch the show’s episodes in the manner I highlighted in
yesterday’s post, and see this shift in plot and theme happen so quickly.) One
way to interpret Ansari’s decision to take the season in this direction would
be audience: that while those groundbreaking early episodes would certainly have
spoken to many American viewers, they would also have felt unfamiliar to many
others; while relationship drama is of course a kind of story with which
virtually all adult audience members can connect. Another interpretation could
focus on storytelling itself—the themes of the early episodes made for interesting
individual stories, but didn’t necessarily lend themselves to serialized
storytelling of the sorts now possible (as I argued yesterday) in streaming
sitcoms; while the question of whether a promising romance will survive or not
is tailor-made to be serialized across a handful of episodes (leading to an
end-of-season cliffhanger of sorts that I won’t spoil here). Or perhaps Ansari
just wanted to make clear that while Dev is partly defined by his Asian American
heritage and identity, he’s also just that much clichéd but realistic sitcom
type: a single person looking for love.
Next TV fooling
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other TV comedies you’d highlight?
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