From its first episode, “Plan B,” which debuted on Netflix back in 2015, “Master of None” has always been an experiment in metatext. The series, from co-creators Aziz Ansari and Alan Young, puts a spin on their own experiences growing up as first-generation immigrants, struggling to make it into Hollywood and navigating through all kinds of anxious “Is this growing up?” experiences, from uncomfortable first dates to career setbacks. The show is a critical darling and won the Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series Emmy twice. However, a lot has changed since the second season finale, “Buona Notte,” arrived in 2017.
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Ansari has remained largely withdrawn from the public eye after a woman accused him of sexual misconduct in 2018. “Master of None” costar and writer Lena Waithe has emerged as a major writing and producing presence, although her projects, including film “Queen and Slim” and streaming series “Them,” and her handling of sexual harassment allegations against actor Jason Mitchell on her series “The Chi,” received mixed reactions. Now, the duo is the major creative force behind “Master of None: Moments in Love,” and their complicated relationships with mainstream success provide this season’s metatext.
Ansari and Yang worked through myriad shifting feelings about their parents, religion, love lives, and professional ambition in the first 20 episodes of the series, and Ansari and Waithe revisit those themes with a slightly narrower focus in ‘Moments in Love.’ What is happiness? Society has a certain set of standards we’re expected to achieve: marriage, homeownership, stable career, kids. That’s all supposed to fall into place by your mid-30s, and that stability is supposed to equal contentment…isn’t it? And if not, is the system wrong, or are you?
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‘Moments in Love’ poses that broad question and then, over the course of its five episodes, offers up varying answers in vignette-style chapters all directed by Ansari and written by Ansari and Waithe. If you brushed off the second season of “Master of None” as almost unbearably twee, rest assured nothing here is as pretentious as the endless pasta adoration and references to Italian and French cinema. There are still affected touches: a fair amount of opera playing over pivotal scenes, a 4×3 aspect ratio, isolated nature shots of leaves and trees. And there is a broadness to some character details that bring to mind the missteps of Waithe’s “Queen and Slim.” But the emotional core of ‘Moments in Love’—the bitterness, the resentment, and the realization that we might not be who we’ve convinced ourselves that we are—feels true.
‘Moments in Love,’ set some years after “Buona Notte,” focuses primarily on Denise (Waithe), whose debut novel, “Three Loves of Althea Waters,” is a critically acclaimed bestseller. Now married to an aspiring antiques dealer named Alicia (Naomi Ackie), Denise lives in a beautiful country home in upstate New York. The couple has a vegetable garden and keeps chickens, the home is gorgeously (and expensively) decorated, and Denise spends her days smoking weed and working on her next book. Everything seems lovely, until Dev and his partner Reshmi (Aysha Kala) come over for dinner. When Dev and Reshmi tumble into a nasty fight, dragging up longstanding disagreements and complaints about each other, the ease with which they attack each other unnerves Alicia. “Don’t let them project that crazy energy onto us,” Denise insists, but what if every relationship is doomed to fail? What if the person you think is right for you isn’t right for you forever?
‘Moments in Love’ takes the relatability of that fear and uses it to build on the characters we thought we knew, with three of the five episodes taking place mostly in Denise and Alicia’s home. On the one hand, this allows for a slight bottle-episode vibe that emphasizes the couple’s established intimacy and domesticity—Alice cooks and cleans, Denise feeds their chickens named after iconic Black songstresses, they smoke weed together in bed, they dance together while doing laundry. The problem with that approach, though, is that it places us squarely in the present without enough contextualization of the past, essentially providing only half of a narrative. These lovers and friends often judge each other based on previous actions that we don’t see—Dev complaining that Denise ignored all her old friends after she became successful; Alicia bringing up an argument she and Denise have been having for a year about kids—which means that the needs of the plot often rush these characters forward. (Again, a similarity with Waithe’s “Queen and Slim.”) The result is a sometimes incomplete picture in which characters’ decisions seem to float with no guiding motivation behind them, in particular the gap of time between Chapters 4 and 5.
Still, ‘Moments in Love’ is well-paced and well-shot, even if its characters don’t always seem fully considered. In terms of characters and performances, Waithe’s version of Denise is noticeably more settled and self-assured, while Dev’s abbreviated success seems to mirror Ansari’s own (especially with lines like, “We used to have it so good … I never realized how good I had it”). His melancholy, downbeat arc is the most noticeable element of the series’ metatextual approach; make of that what you will. The strongest element of the series, though, is the wonderfully compelling Ackie, who made such an impression on the second season of “The End of the F***ing World.” She is flat-out fantastic here as Alicia, her bubbly positivity curdling ever so slightly after each disagreement with Waithe’s Denise. She shines in both isolated scenes (during a heart-to-heart with Reshmi, or while explaining her career switch from chemistry to interior design) and during “Chapter 4,” a gripping episode that with thoroughness and empathy approaches the IVF process. She is the reason to watch “Master of None: Moments in Love,” and when the series’ best scene evokes Mike Nichols’s classic “The Graduate,” her face is the one you’ll seek out. [B]
“Master of None: Moments in Love” debuts on Netflix on May 23.