The Second Season Of Master of None Is Casually Great

“First Dates,” the fourth episode of Master of None‘s second season, opens with a short vignette of women swiping through a dating app—at a funeral, on the toilet, at a bar with friends—until they come across Dev, the lead character played by series co-creator Aziz Ansari. They look through his profile, mock his pics (“Think he likes pasta much?”) and either swipe left or right. It ends with Dev at a bar with his friend Arnold (Eric Wareheim, who directed the episode), exclaiming proudly, “I got a match!” This simple but very clever reversal of perspectives—normally, the show’s protagonist would be doing the swiping—is typical of Master of None‘s often brilliant, always breezy, second season. In this latest batch of episodes (ten in total; we’ve seen the first four), Aziz and his creative partner, Alan Yang, are back to their old tricks, but this time they perform them with a cooler self-assurance. The show is once again focused on Dev’s gastronomical and romantic pursuits, but it’s done with a loose confidence that was hinted at in the terrific first season, now in full bloom. Aziz and Alan aren’t so preoccupied with the traditional building blocks of linear storytelling as they are with harvesting a specific mood and tone. Creating any form of scripted entertainment is a painstaking process, and there’s no doubt that a self-critical perfectionist like Aziz slaved over every detail of every episode, but it does not show. Like its easygoing lead character, Master of None is down for whatever. Aziz trusts that his audience—at this point trained in the flights of fancy of auteur-driven television—is as open-minded as he is and willing to go wherever he wants to take them. Take the premiere, a stunning episode shot entirely in black and white, spoken mostly in Italian and set in the northern city of Modena, a setting that seems pulled from the Italian neorealist cinema to which Aziz is lovingly paying homage. At the end of last season, Dev, nursing a broken heart, went into a self-imposed exile in Italy to learn the art of pasta-making, and season two picks up in the waning days of his exodus. He’s now semi-fluent in the language, buds with the locals and right at home cycling through the narrow cobblestone streets. He has also, of course, met a girl (the charming Alessandra Mastronardi) who has a boyfriend but who, based on the look she gives him when they eventually hug good-bye, will factor into the season later on. The episode, like the ones that follow, is gorgeous to look at. Vivid and immaculately composed, the visuals borrow more from art house cinema than they do from television sitcoms. That first episode, which involves a stolen iPhone (an homage to the 1948 film by Vittorio De Sica, The Bicycle Thief), is followed by another picaresque Italian adventure, where Dev is joined in the countryside by his “big bud” Arnold (Dev is “little bud”). The 30 minutes that follow, as Aziz and Eric make the most out of the sumptuous Italian countryside on their way to an ex’s wedding, is peak Master of None, a laugh-out-loud short film that treats eating great food with great friends with the same reverence as it does moving on from a broken heart. It’s an intoxicating medley. The third episode, titled “Religion,” and the aforementioned fourth, which follows Dev on a series of first dates, stand as two platonic examples of Aziz following his two primary muses: his cultural heritage as an Indian-American and smartphone-assisted dating. In “Religion,” Aziz reveals to his Muslim parents (played by his real parents, both scene-stealers) that he eats pork, and, in a gleeful scene, Dev and his younger cousin go HAM at a BBQ festival. By the final scene, the episode’s quiet power sneaks up on you. And in “First Dates,” which should win an Emmy for best editing, many dates are stitched together to feel like one continuous evening. It’s exhilarating to see. Aziz has said that the third season of Master of None isn’t a sure thing. Like Louis C.K. and his groundbreaking FX show Louie, arguably Aziz’s biggest inspiration, Aziz only makes television when he feels creatively juiced, not out of a contractual obligation. “I’ve got to become a different guy before I write a third season, is my personal thought,” he told New York‘s Vulture. “I’ve got to get married or have a kid or something. I don’t have anything else to say about being a young guy, being single in New York, eating food around town all the time.” If that’s indeed the case, then treat these ten episodes like a succulent meal at your favorite restaurant that might be closing soon, and savor it. Related Links: Joss Whedon Shows Us What A World Without Planned Parenthood Would Look Like

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