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With Aziz Ansari now behind the camera rather than in front of it, his series on modern love instead follows two queer, Black women – and is all the more mature and radical for it
There is another reality in which the third season of Aziz Ansari’s sorta-sitcom Master of None looks very different from the one now streaming on Netflix. In this alternate timeline, Ansari was not personally caught up in the #MeToo fallout and the Covid-19 pandemic never happened; thus it is possible for season three to pick up where season two left off: a lovelorn Dev whimsically riding his Italian neo-realist bicycle to buzzy food spots, making bittersweet remarks about millennial dating as he goes.
However, the events mentioned above did happen, and Master of None is a different show as a result. In January 2018, the now defunct babe.net website reported a claim by a woman that she had felt “violated” after a sexual encounter with Ansari (he denied any wrongdoing, though he said that he had taken the claims “to heart”, later adding in a standup show that he felt “terrible that this person felt this way”). When the allegation was made, Master of None had already picked up a Golden Globe and two Emmys, including a history-making one for Lena Waithe, who became the first Black woman to win the Emmy for outstanding writing for a comedy series, for an episode partly based on her experience of coming out. This was the platform from which Waithe launched a stellar screenwriting career that now includes TV series (The Chi; Them) and the 2019 movie Queen & Slim. Yet Master of None remained very much Ansari’s vehicle. Continue reading...