The first two seasons of Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None mostly followed the pattern set by past shows starring successful stand-up comedians, such as Seinfeld and Louie: short episodes loosely based around the comedian’s life. In season three, now available on Netflix four years after season two and three years after Ansari’s semi-cancellation over a date gone wrong, Ansari has shifted the show’s tone dramatically, moving the focus away from himself, lengthening the episodes, and concentrating on heavier themes. Ansari, who has written and directed all of these episodes (previous episodes were occasionally directed by others), has titled this season “Moments in Love.”
The first two seasons of Master of None centered on Dev Shah, a millennial actor based on the real-life Ansari, whose romantic escapades in Brooklyn provided fodder for lighthearted social commentary (think a less ambitious, male version of Lena Dunham’s Girls). But here, Ansari the actor is only a bit player. The focus is instead on the relationship between Denise (Lena Waithe), a New York Times-bestselling author trying to follow up on the success of her first novel, and Alicia (Naomi Ackie), who has a Ph.D. in chemistry but works at an antique store and is trying to get a job in interior design.
The new lead characters are complemented by an entirely different aesthetic. The episodes, or “chapters,” as they’re called here, open with colored title cards, and the soundtrack features healthy helpings of opera and classical piano. Instead of the urban setting of the early seasons, the action here takes place mostly in upstate New York, where Denise and Alicia have a house that looks as if it was ordered straight out of Architectural Digest. At their spacious, peaceful country home, you can hear the sounds of shoes crunching on pebbles and crickets chirping after sundown. When they’re not cuddling together in bed, doing laundry while dancing to “Everybody Everybody,” or having discussions about what they would do to get a book deal, Denise and Alicia feed chickens, have breakfast, and smoke marijuana, not necessarily in that order.
In the first episode, Dev comes over for dinner with his girlfriend and provides a rare injection of levity, gushing over the design and layout of the house: “Oh my god, this is cozy central … I feel like I’m at Walden Pond!” During dinner, the camera is at a strange remove from the characters, making us feel like we’re watching them through a glass box inside a museum display case. It is as if Ansari the director wants to prevent us from completely joining these characters in their lives, preferring to keep us at a distance, much as they, even while together, often appear remote and detached from one another. “We’re not the same friends we used to be,” Dev says to Denise, accusing her of opting to make new, more prestigious friends after the success of her first book. “It’s hard. You’re doing so well. And I’m doing so bad,” Dev laments, referring to his slumping acting career (and possibly alluding to Ansari’s real-life #MeToo troubles). “It’s embarrassing.” Denise tries to reassure him with some timeworn truisms: “You’re just in a valley now. I used to be in a valley … I climbed out of it. You can too.”
Dev, mournfully recalling how good things used to be for him while admiring Denise’s apparent personal and professional success, is having a difficult time. During the dinner, he and his girlfriend passive-aggressively, and sometimes outright aggressively, nag each other for not taking the steps necessary to be more successful in their careers. The question of whether or not to have children, a prominent theme in season one, is raised again here early on. After Dev’s girlfriend privately reveals to Alicia that she really wants to have children, Alicia divulges her own desire to have children to Denise.
Denise prefers to “wait until the dust settles” from her book to have a baby, but Alicia insists that they begin to try as soon as possible. “I don’t want to be 52 and pregnant,” she tells Denise. “I’m 34. My ovaries…” She has thought of a sperm donor, her friend Darius (Anthony Welsh), and Denise agrees. But just when it looks as if things will continue to proceed along their happily-ever-after course, a visit from one of Denise’s friends in chapter two, in addition to Denise’s difficulties in writing the second book, begin to cast doubt over the long-term viability of their relationship.
Master of None’s change in leads and genre is a bold and inspired move. Waithe and Ackie are superb in dramatizing the shifts in moods, from heartwarming affection to pent-up frustration, that can occur within the course of a relationship. Ackie is particularly remarkable in chapter four, a stand-alone, emotionally fraught episode about her experience with fertility treatments, which should be required viewing for any couple considering waiting until the female partner’s mid-30s to try to conceive. And when the show’s cinematography is not distancing us from the characters, it can be visually quite striking.
The main problem with “Moments in Love” is that its slow pace can occasionally verge on the glacial, at times making for tedious viewing. Extended shots of, say, a character laboriously removing sheets from their bed or waiting for their clothes in a laundromat or eating a sandwich alone in their car can feel like art-house pretension. There are some heated conversations in the first three episodes, but there are too many long scenes in which nothing much happens. One could argue that this is life — periods of tedium interspersed with brief moments of passion — but do we really want or need to see undramatized life on screen? Not for nothing did Henry James say that art is the completion of life, not the representation of it. Art gives texture and color to life, which is why good novels, movies, and TV shows are usually so much more interesting than transcriptions of a person’s weekly activities. “Moments in Love” rises to the level of great art when it is showing us the texture and color of human relationships; at other times, it might as well be called “moments in monotony.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
